/<0.  2,2_.'OZ. 


^  PRINCETON,  N.  J.  ^^ 


Presented    by"T^S.\i  •  C"^  •  S'^rOrxd  . 


BX  9843  .G43  Y4 T882^ 
Gannett,  William  Channing, 

1840-1923. 
A  year  of  miracle 


A  YEAR  OF  MIRACLE 


A  POEM  IN  FOUR  SERMONS. 


w.  c/gannett. 


BOSTON : 

Geo.  H.  Ellis,  141   Franklin  Street. 

1882. 


Copyright,  1881, 
By  W.  C.  Gannett. 


^^,  TO.  Po/2 
UNITY    CHURCH, 
St.  Paul. 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

I.  Treasures  of  the  Snow 9 

II.  Resurregtiox 39 

III.  Flowers 63 

IV,  The  Harvest-Secret 87 


TREASURES  OF  THE  SNOW, 


I. 

TREASURES  OF  THE  SNOW. 

If  a  sunset  were  as  rare  as  a  comet,  the  people 
would  all  be  out  upon  the  hill-tops  —  astrono- 
mers with  their  telescopes,  poets  with  their  pens, 
artists  with  their  brushes  —  to  captui*e  what 
they  could  of  it,  and  give  it  immortality.  Or, 
if  only  once  in  a  year  the  eastern  skies  held 
sunrise,  we  should  be  out  of  bed  betimes  that 
morning  to  watch  the  gold  and  crimson  pa- 
geant passing  up  the  sky.  But  because  these 
glories  face  us  every  day,  we  are  color-blind  to 
them.  Still  worse  with  glories  that  are  near 
as  well  as  frequent.  We  envy  a  friend  starting 
for  Europe,  going  where  there  is  "  so  much  to 
see,"  we  say, —  Alps,  cathedrals,  and  old  art: 
as  if  a  year  spent  in  the  nearest  pasture  would 
not  crowd  our  mind  with  miracles,  if  only  we 
had  eyes  to  see  with ! 

"  Hast  thou  entered  into  the  treasures  of  the 
snow  ? "     Probably  not :  for  he  who  asked  the 


10  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

question  spoke  of  a  treasure-chamber,  rare  in 
Bible  lands,  but  opened  to  us  anew  with  each 
December;  open  all  the  winter  long;  opened 
in  every  door-yard  and  at  every  window-pane : 
and  a  palace  so  common  and  so  near  as  that  is 
not  a  palace  to  eyes  that  chiefly  love  the  far 
things  and  the  rare.  But,  if  only  once  in  many 
years  those  wondrous  treasure-chambers  were 
unlocked,  how  we  should  hand  down  the  tradi- 
tion,—  like  men  who,  having  caught  one  glimpse 
of  some  new  Mexico,  should  prattle  of  an  El 
Dorado  all  their  lives!  At  Beaufort  in  South 
Carolina,  the  whole  population,  black  and  white, 
turned  out  one  -winter's  day  to  see  —  a  frozen 
pond!  A  northern  teacher,  dying  on  one  of 
the  Sea  Islands  there  in  slavery-time,  was  en- 
shrined in  the  memory  of  her  southern  friends 
by  a  snow-fall,  that  happened  to  float  down  on 
the  north  Avind  just  after  the  stranger  had  been 
laid  in  her  fresh  grave  :  it  seemed  like  a  flight 
of  friendly  angels  from  her  home-land,  because, 
like  angels'  visits,  its  comings  were  so  few  and 
far  between.  The  Sianxese  prince  heard  of 
"  solid  water  "  with  complete  unf aith, —  a  mira- 
cle too  great  for  even  Oriental  credence.  And 
in  Abyssinia,  far  under  the  tropic  sky,  Bruce, 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SNOW.  11 

the  hunter  for  the  sources  of  the  Nile,  came  to  a 
village  where 

"  An  old  man  told  him,  with  a  grave  surprise 

Which  made  his  childlike  wonder  almost  grand 
How,  in  his  youth,  there  fell  from  out  the  skies 

A  feathery  whiteness  over  all  the  land, — 
A  strange,  soft,  spotless  sometliing,  pure  as  light. 

For  whicli  their  questioned  language  liad  no  name, — 
That  slione  and  sparkled  for  a  day  and  night, 

Then  vanished  all  as  weirdly  as  it  came ; 
Leaving  no  vestige,  gleam,  or  hue  or  scent 

On  the  round  hill  or  in  the  purple  air, 
To  certify  their  mute  bewilderment 

That  such  a  presence  had  indeed  been  there  !  " 

And  they  had  named  their  village  from  that 
one  unprecedented  snow-fall.  Thus,  men  stand 
in  awe  before  the  snow  where  its  treasures  are 
rare. 

In  the  Hebrew  land  it  was  by  no  means  so 
unheard  of.  It  glistens  on  the  top  of  Hermon, 
and  lies  deep  in  the  high  ravines  of  Lebanon, 
until  the  summer  is  far  advanced  ;  and,  unless 
the  climate  be  changed,  Jesus,  when  a  boy,  had 
chances  to  make  snow-balls  now  and  then  on 
the  hill-tops  around  Nazareth.  Yet,  in  that 
grand  drama  of  Job  in  which  God  asks  the  man 
our  question,  "Hast  thou  entered  into  the  treas- 


12  A  YEAR   OF   MIRACLE. 

ures  of  the  snow?"  it  is  ranked  among  the 
major  wonders, —  with  the  morning  stars  and 
the  sea,  with  the  lightnings  and  Leviathan  and 
death.  Majestic  grouping,  is  it  not  ?  But,  after 
all,  the  morning-stars  and  the  lightnings  and 
death  belong  to  the  every-days;  and  the  writer 
mentions  also  the  dew  and  the  rain  and  the  wild 
goats,  and  the  young  ravens  hungry  in  the  win- 
ter,—  things  small  and  common  enough.  Per- 
haps in  his  case  it  was  not  so  much  the  rareness 
that  made  the  appreciation,  but  that  he  had 
poet's  eyes  to  see  with.  The  poet  is  the  man 
with  double  vision,  one  who  is  at  once  near- 
sighted and  far-sighted,  who  sees  the  closer 
things  as  wonders  because  he  sees  their  far  re- 
lations too.  Where  we  say  "  poet,"  we  might 
say  simply  "  seer."  At  all  events,  this  Bible- 
poet,  phrasing  a  question  for  God's  lips,  phrases 
it  fitly  for  the  God  of  Nature  to  ask.  I  hear  it 
uttered  thus :  "  Thou  seest  the  j^ebble,  the  rain- 
drop, the  grass-blade,  the  dust-mote,  the  snow- 
flake:  hast  thou  entered  into  their  treasures?  I 
make  my  worlds  out  of  them !  " 

To-day,  again,  the  question  lies  written  on  the 
ground  in  our  fresh  snow-fall.  We  will  accept 
its  invitation,  and  try  to  enter  in  a  little  way. 


TREASURES   OF   THE   SNOW.  13 

The  colors  of  the  spring  dawn  slowly,  the 
color  of  the  winter  in  an  hour, —  when  all  is 
ready.  Not  until  all  is  ready.  A  night,  away 
back  in  October,  sets  a  frosty  seal  upon  the 
grass  and  trees;  and  Nature  knows  the  sign 
and  begins  to  unrobe  her  for  the  sleep.  Her 
colors,  dropping  back  from  green  through  yel- 
low, orange,  and  the  reds,  fade  at  last  to  browns 
and  russets;  and  then  she  rustles  into  naked- 
ness. Just  when  she  is  lying  down,  the  Indian 
season  comes,  and  with  a  gentle  dream  of  sum- 
mer she  drowses  into  death.  The  birds  have 
flown;  the  flowers,  too.  The  ferns  and  vines, 
the  little  children  of  the  woodlands,  have  van- 
ished to  their  secret  nurseries  underground.  The 
hills  grow  bleak  and  bare;  the  fields  roughen 
into  ridge  and  furrow;  and  broken  stalks,  and 
the  stones,  hidden  since  the  May-days,  stand 
stiffly  out  again  in  sight.  The  trees  now  stand 
forlorn  with  empty  nests, —  "bare,  ruined  choirs, 
where  late  the  sweet  birds  sang."  Their  toss- 
ing arms  lash  the  ground  with  wild,  black  shad- 
ows through  the  windy,  moonlit  nights.  The 
cold  increases;  the  winds  search  and  whistle 
and  sting;  the  pools  skim  over  of  a  morning; 
the  cattle  huddle  in  the  field ;  the  fowls  stand 


14  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

drearily  in  the  lee  of  the  bush  3  faces  redden  on 
the  street;  and,  under  the  stars,  fire-light  gleams 
through  the  window-panes. 

Meanwhile,  the  home-life  deepens.  As  a 
friend  once  said  to  me,  the  seasons  indoors 
seem  to  just  reverse  the  order  of  the  outward 
seasons.  As  the  leaves  are  fading  in  the  fall, 
Ave  feel  within  our  bodies  and  our  minds  a  brac- 
ing spring ;  plans  gather  vigor,  and  we  bend 
ourselves  for  the  hard  work  of  the  year.  The 
winter  brings  heart  and  mind  to  their  full  force 
of  growth.  Nature's  winter  is  the  human  sum- 
mer-time. Then,  spring  begins  to  make  us  lan- 
guid. And  the  busy  summer  of  earth-life  brings 
to  ourselves  a  pause  and  rest  and  comparative 
inaction,  like  an  inward  winter.  Reckoning  this 
Avay  by  the  spirit's  calendar.  Thanksgiving  Day 
is  Easter ;  and  the  Easter  is  Thanksgiving  Day 
for  a  winter's  inward  harvests ;  for  then  we 
shall  have  gathered  in  and  barned  away  in 
memory  what  we  have  read  and  thought  and 
done  in  our  growing  hours,  while  the  snow  lay 
outside  on  the  ground. 

So,  as  Nature  is  getting  ready  for  what  may 
happen  out  of  doors,  indoors  it  is  all  astir. 
Hands   oftener   meet   other   hands  in  Avorks  of 


TREASURES   OF    THE    SNOW.  15 

service,  and  hearts  are  closer  drawn  to  hearts. 
The  books  come  forth  in  the  long  evenings,  the 
story-telling  begins,  the  fathers  and  mothers 
gather  the  children  around  their  knees  by  the 
cheerful  blaze, —  that  blaze  itself  the  sunshine 
of  old  springs  and  summers  in  the  far-off  j^ast. 
Over  all  within,  without,  is  God,  who  careth 
for  us  thus;  who  made  those  summers  of  old 
and  stored  their  heat,  who  is  preparing  now 
the  seasons  of  our  immortality.  At  last,  all  is 
ready. 

As  we  sit  and  work,  or  sit  and  dream,  a  day 
comes  in  Avhich  a  stillness  falls.  A  hush  is  on 
the  earth ;  a  gray  sky  is  overspread  above ;  an 
uneasiness  is  in  the  air  which  is  not  wdnd.  Go 
to  the  window  and  watch.  A  few  heralds  clad 
in  w^hite  come  floating  down,  turning  this  w^ay, 
turning  that  way,  like  scouts  seeking  for  paths 
and  camping-places.  Then,  of  a  sudden,  the 
thick,  dull  sky  is  alive  with  trooping  forms! 
The  ways  of  the  air  are  filled  with  the  army  of 
the  Snow !  Their  tread  is  not  with  sound,  but 
second  by  second  they  arrive,  and  alight,  and 
possess  themselves  of  the  hills  and  the  hollows. 
The  fields  grow  silent  and  white  with  their 
gleaming  camp.     Whole  States  are  changed  in 


16  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

a  few  hushed  moments  ;  and  no  stone,  no  twig, 
no  cranny,  is  forgotten.  Only  the  all-enclosing 
air  could  do  it ;  and  the  air  has  done  it !  The 
signs  of  human  i)arting  and  property  are  blotted 
out  in  indiscriminate  conquest  as  Nature  seizes 
again  on  her  old  patrimony  of  the  earth,  ignor- 
ing man  who  has  marked  out  his  farms  upon  it. 
All  the  men  of  the  land  in  armies  could  not 
work  such  uniform  obliteration  in  a  year.  All 
the  men  of  the  land,  as  builders,  could  not  fash- 
ion in  a  century  such  rare  and  universal  archi- 
tecture as  the  hurrying  wind  and  snow  build  up 
tosrether  on  tree  and  house  and  rock  and  fence 
and  everything  that  offers  niche  or  pedestal. 

How  they  come  trooping  down  !  Hour  after 
hour  we  watch,  and  still  the  host  comes  march- 
ing in, —  now  in  steady,  downright  phalanxes, — 
now  swerving,  whole  solid  cokimns,  in  rapid 
flanking  movements,  —  now  in  little  whirling 
charges  dashing  in  from  this  side  and  from  that 
in  furious  melee. 

And  each  of  the  mighty  army  is  clad  in  crys- 
tal panoj^ly.  Let  us  waylay  some  of  the  strag- 
glers, and  examine  them.  T]iat  crystal  panoply 
is  our  first  "  treasure."  The  captives  are  by  no 
means  clad  alike,  however.     Upwards  of  a  thou- 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SNOW.  17 

sand  differing  forms  of  snow-flakes  have  been  ob- 
served. I  have  seen  a  book  containing  some 
two  hundred  of  them  figured.  Here  arc  simple 
prisms,  three-sided  or  six-sided.  Here  are  some 
tiny  pyramids  one-thirtieth  of  an  inch  in  height, 
yet  as  mathematically  perfect  in  their  lines  as 
the  Great  Pyramid  of  Egypt  in  its  best  estate. 
And  here  are  prisms  capped  with  the  pyramids. 
More  familiar  to  us  are  these  star-like  forms  ; 
but  verily,  as  Avitli  the  stars  above,  one  differ- 
eth  from  another  in  its  glory.  The  simplest  is 
this  wherein  six  prisms  radiate  from  a  centre, 
like  wheel-spokes  from  a  hub.  Then,  on  both 
spokes  and  hub  Nature  sets  to  work  to  play  her 
variations.  Each  ray,  beset  on  either  side  with 
tinier  prisms,  takes  on  the  semblance  of  a  fern- 
leaf;  and  the  species  seem  to  vary  in  outline 
as  the  fern-species  vary  in  the  summer  woods. 
That  centre,  which  I  ignobly  called  the  "  hub," 
enlarges  to  a  six-sided  plate,  or  often  is  itself 
a  star  whose  glittering  arms  stem  off  to  be 
tipped  with  little  trefoils  or  rosettes.  Here 
lies  a  star  within  a  star,  and  that  within  an- 
other star,  and  all  Avithin  a  fourth!  Some  of 
these  centres  are  wrought  in  finest  open-work, 
others  are  filled  white  to  the  rim ;  but  under  the 


18  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

microscope  we  could  see  these  last  all  fretted 
over  with  fairy  hieroglyphics,  silvery  mosaics 
marked  off  in  triangles  and  hexagons.  In  one 
variety  the  crossing  prisms  make  you  think 
of  the  child's  puzzle,  where  the  little  wooden 
blocks  lock  together  into  a  tight  nest.  An- 
other form  seems  different  from  all  the  rest: 
it  is  a  star  set  at  each  end  of  a  prism  like  the 
two  wheels  on  an  axle-tree.  Up  in  the  Polar 
seas,  Dr.  Scoresby  one  day  found  his  ship's 
deck  covered  three  inches  deep  with  such  little 
air-chariots. 

But  these  dainty  forms,  and  this  variety  in 
their  daintiness,  are  not  the  only  treasures  of 
the  snow-flake.  Through  all  that  variety  runs 
identity.  The  flakes  are  akin  in  their  deeper 
being,  as  negro  and  Esquimaux,  cannibal  and 
Quaker,  are  yet  all  one  in  human  nature.  Snow- 
nature  is  bound  by  a  law  of  sixes.  The  sides  of 
every  prism  and  pyramid  meet  at  one  angle, — 
that  of  60°, —  or  its  multiples :  the  rays  of  every 
star  diverge  at  that  one  angle ;  every  vein  upon 
those  little  fern-leaves  joins  its  stem  at  that  one 
angle,  or  its  multiples.  The  stars  are  all  six- 
rayed,  or  rarely  twelve ;  the  centres  all  hexag- 
onal.    Watch    the  flakes   of   a   whole   winter's 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SXOW.  19 

storms,  climb  Chimborazo,  go  to  the  Pole,  or 
make  your  mimic  snow-storm  for  yourself  inside 
a  chemist's  bottle, —  never  will  you  find  a  fin- 
ished star  Avdtli  five  rays  or  with  seven,  or  with 
that  law  of  the  angles  broken.  The  rays  them- 
selves are  .broken,  but  never  that  creative  law. 
Bruised,  shattered,  huddled  together,  the  snow- 
flakes  reach  us  ;  but  through  all  bruise  and 
shatter  that  law  of  "  sixes  "  lies  plain  upon  them. 
By  that  they  are  born  and  live  and  die. 

Is  it  not  very  impressive  and  a^ve-f ul, —  these 
mathematics  carried  down  to  the  microscopic 
measurements,  these  "  ethics  of  the  dust,"  as 
Kuskin  calls  them, —  tlie  grand  legislation  of 
the  universe  laid  thus  upon  its  invisible  atoms ! 

Kow,  who  can  explain  such  wondrous  birth 
and  fashioning?  Shall  we  answer  for  the  snow- 
flake  what  George  MacDonald  makes  the  baby 
answer  for  itself?  — 

"  Where  did  you  come  from,  baby  dear  ? 
Out  of  the  everywhere  into  here! 

"  How  did  it  all  just  come  to  be  you  ? 
God  thought  about  me, —  and  so  I  grew! 

"  Where  did  you  get  that  pearly  ear  ? 
God  spoke,  and  it  came  out  to  hear  !  " 


20  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

Did  God  look,  and  the  snoAv-flake  come  out  to 
be  looked  at  ?  Somewhat  so  would  the  old 
Genesis  and  Psalm- writers  of  the  eastern  land 
have  solved  the  problem.  The  answer  then 
was  simjDle, —  "He  saith  to  the  snow,  Be  thou 
uj^on  the  earth."  Somewhat  thus  would  the 
poets  and  the  religious  feeling  of  every  land 
and  time  solve  it,  our  own  as  much  as  all  the 
rest.  Did  we  wish  to  be  a  little  more  knowing, 
we  might  answer,  "  The  air  was  full  of  va- 
por, and  the  thermometer  fell  to  32°,  and  so,  of 
course,  it  snowed."  Of  course,  it  did;  but  did 
you  ever  think  of  it?  —  "of  course"  is  our 
appeal  to  the  unsolved  mystery,  the  Course  of 
Nature. 

The  scientific  men,  however,  who  go  dredging 
in  those  deeps  of  mystery  bring  up,  at  least,  a 
guess.  They  tell  us  that  all  substances  (solid 
granite  and  hard  iron  as  well  as  lightest  gas) 
consist  of  atoms  suspended  in  an  ether,  an  ether 
that  is  ever  thrilling  with  invisible  vibrations  of 
heat  and  light  and  electricity.  To  their  eyes, 
the  universe,  through  and  through,  is  in  unceas- 
ing motion.  And  when  we  say,  "  the  thermom- 
eter falls,"  what  Ave  mean,  in  brief,  is  this :  the 
water-atoms,  while   the    water   is  in   the   form 


TREASURES    OK    THP:    SNOW.  21 

of  vapor,  move  loosely,  freely,  distantly ;  but, 
as  the  cold  increases,  this  heat-dance  slackens, 
and  the  atoms  gradually  close  together,  until 
the  vapor,  changing  form,  becomes  a  "liquid"; 
with  still  greater  cold,  the  atoms  keep  on  ap- 
proaching one  another,  imtil  by  a  second  trans- 
formation they  are  —  not  fast-locked,  by  any 
means — ^but  faster-locked,  into  what  avc  call  the 
"  solid  "  form, —  and  thus  the  snow  is  born  ! 

And  it  is  by  a  measured  march  tliat  the  vapor- 
atoms  have  thus  closed  and  coalesced.  Each 
Lilliputian  knows  his  place,  and  like  a  veteran 
soldier  moves  in  rhythms  to  his  post  within  the 
flake.  In  rhythms :  the  Egyptian  sculptures 
show  us  2)ictures  of  the  way  in  which  the  great 
stones  of  their  pyramids  were  dragged,  in  that 
day  before  the  engines  had  appeared.  Five 
hundred  men  are  seen  tugging  at  the  ropes  and 
rollers ;  but,  to  secure  the  pull  together  whicli 
alone  Avould  move  the  block,  there  stands  among 
them  a  musician  playing  on  an  instrument.  And 
the  stones  are  thus  drawn  by  music  to  their 
courses  in  the  pyramid.  Now  fancy  the  water- 
vapor  atoms  marching  in, —  through  the  billionth 
of  an  inch,  invisible  hosts  to  inaudible  music, — 
to  build  up  the  snow-flake  !  What  time  they 
kee^^ ! 


22  A    YKAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

But  whence  comes  that  variety  in  building- 
plans, —  now  star,  now  prism,  and  nowpyi'amid? 
Doubtless  from  some  difference  in  temperature, 
or  in  the  amount  of  vapor  in  the  air,  or  in  the 
rush-rate  of  the  storm.  In  still  days,  with  the 
temperature  not  far  below  the  freezing-point,  the 
stars  fall  large  and  fair.  Tlie  stars  that  fall  from 
Jilinnesota  skies  are,  on  the  average,  much  more 
perfect  than  those  that  light  ujdou  the  sea-coasts. 
Dr.  Kane  describes  the  snow  that  wraps  the 
jcanty  vegetation  near  the  Pole  as  a  three-layered 
blanket :  first,  a  light  and  air-filled  layer  in  the 
early  winter ;  then,  the  solid,  tight-packed  crys- 
tals of  mid-winter  ;  then,  another  porous  stratum 
in  the  spring.  We  will  not  say,  with  one  who 
called  our  admiration  to  the  snow-flake  a  hun- 
dred years  ago,  that  "  the  more  common  forms 
are  due  to  temperature,  etc.,  but  for  the  infinite 
variety  of  types  we  must  go  to  tlie  will  and 
pleasure  of  the  Great  First  Cause."  For  the 
flower  rare  here  lives  somewhere  as  the  weed, 
the  excej^tion  here  is  somewhere  the  rule  ;  and 
the  weed,  the  rule,  the  e very-day  miracle  re- 
mains the  miracle.  The  oiext  snow-flake  will 
startle  us,  if  we  can  only  see  it  as  it  is. 

How  big  or,  rather,  how  little  are  those  atoms, 


TREASURKS    OF    THE    SNOW.  23 

is  our  natural  wonder,  as  we  hear  such  state- 
ments made.  They  have  never  yet  been  seen ; 
they  are  merely  guessed  at  to  explain  certain 
phenomena  that  are  seen ;  so  that  their  size, 
or  want  of  size,  is  rather  j^roblematical.  But 
the  calculators  have  tried  their  best.  After  dif- 
ferent methods  of  approximation,  Sir  William 
Thomson,  the  great  English  mathematician  an- 
nounced his  provisional  answer  thus :  If  a  drop 
of  water  should  be  magnified  to  the  size  of 
the  earth, —  one  drop  swollen  to  the  planet's 
size, —  then  the  constituent  molecules  of  that 
dro])  would  probably  be  larger  than  shot,  and 
probably  smaller  than  cricket-balls!  When  you 
have  taken  this  in  thoroughly,  then  remember 
that  each  molecule  of  water  is  itself  compounded 
of  atoms  more  minute  of  oxygen  and  hydrogen. 
Did  I  not  rightly  say  "hosts,"  to  hint  the  census 
of  the  snow-flake  ?  To  watch  a  dew-drop  gather 
on  a  grass-blade,  and  whiten  into  frost,  is  as  if 
one  standing  on  a  mountain-top  were  watching 
the  muster  of  a  mighty  army  in  the  dim  lands 
far  below. 

Even  if  this  atomic  theory  were  known  to  be 
certain  fact,  instead  of  being  merely  to-day's 
wisest  guess,  have  we   explained  the  snow-flake 


24  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

yet  ?  Hardly  more  than  by  our  bare  thermom- 
eter statement.  We  have  only  moved  our  "  of 
course"  a  little  farther  back,  where  still  the 
mystery  remains.  What,  and  whence,  are  the 
atoms  ?  How  came  each  to  know  its  place  and 
be  able  to  move  in  rhythms  to  it  ?  And  by 
what  force  impelled  ! 

Remember  that  no  j^article  of  moisture  is 
debarred  this  transfiguration.  The  broad  ocean 
and  the  land-locked  pond  and  the  roadside  pool 
may  all  be  one  in  destiny,  because  one  in  their 
origin.  No  ditch  so  grimy  with  reeking  poison 
but  its  vapor,  mounting,  may  take  on  the  form 
of  stars  and  become  a  pure  and  white-winged 
wonder  of  the  air.  However  poor  its  earth-lot, 
this  heaven  awaits  it.  Could  we  question  every 
flake  that  Avanders  to  our  window-ledge  about 
its  past,  we  should  hear  a  mingled  song  like  that 
the  Christians  fancy  of  the  hosts  before  the 
throne  of  God  :  — 

I  came  from  off  mid-ocean, 

I  in  a  wild-flower  lay, 
I  came  from  a  brook  on  a  mountain-side. 

And  I  from  Niagara's  spray ; 
And  I  was  a  tear  in  a  mother's  eyes 

For  a  little  one  gone  away. 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SXOW.  25 

What  histories  they  could  tell,  what  gospels  of 
beauty  preach,  these  little  stars,  if  they  could 
"  sing  together"  to  our  hearing  !  And  all  share 
in  the  glory  and  the  song,  whether  destined  for 
the  slow-dying  glacier,  or  born  to  flutter  for  an 
instant,  light  upon  the  stream,  and  A^anish. 

We  have  entered  only  one  of  the  treasure- 
chambers.  We  will  not  go  through  all.  The 
Pope's  palace,  the  Vatican,  has  over  four  thou- 
sand rooms.  I  know  not  how  many  Ave  might 
expect  to  find  in  this  tiny  house  not  made  Avith 
hands. 

But  let  us  linger  a  moment  to  think  of  tlie 
Ijh.ysical  poti^ev  hiA^olved  in  an  inch-deep  snow- 
storm. The  amount  of  heat  absorbed  and  lib- 
erated Avould  Avork  the  engines  of  the  Avorld. 
First,  think  Avhat  masses  of  Avater  have  to  be 
raised  as  vapor  from  the  ocean-toj^,  and  drifted 
far  and  wide  across  the  lands,  to  prepare  that 
even  gray  sky  Avhich  made  us  say,  "  It  is  going 
to  snow," — and  try  to  conceive  or  calculate  the 
heat  absorbed  in  that  operation.  Then  think  of 
the  snoAV  that  covers  all  the  State  an  incli  deep 
in  an  hour,  and  try  to  conceive  or  calculate  the 
amount  of  heat  liberated  in  this  reverse  opera- 
tion as    the   vapor   falls  back  not  only  to  the 


26  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

liquid,  but  the  solid  state.  Let  me  state  it  thus, 
calculating  from  some  of  Tyndall's  figures:  A 
boy  grasps  a  handful  from  tlie  fence-top  and  pats 
it  to  a  ball,  Aveighing  half  a  pound, —  intending  it 
for  his  friend  a  few  yards  off.  But  the  force 
employed  to  make  from  water-vapor  that  snow 
of  which  he  made  his  ball,  would  fling  a  ball 
weighing  one  hundred  pounds  two-thirds  of  a 
mile  into  the  air.  The  force  emjDloyed  to  make 
the  half-pound  of  water- va])or  out  of  the  original 
oxygen  and  hydrogen  would  fling  a  hundred- 
pound  ball  nearly  five  miles  into  the  air !  That 
force  summoned  to  make  one  half-pound  of 
snow !  Then  think  of  the  engines  at  work  to 
make  the  Avhole  snow-storm !  Think  of  the 
might,  as  well  as  tenderness,  it  took  to  press 
those  few  frost-flowers  upon  your  window-panes! 
You  did  not  dream  what  strong  hands  lurked 
in  your  bed-chamber  through  the  winter  night. 
The  color  of  the  snow  is  another  of  its  treas- 
ures. To  enter  into  that,  we  must  open  the  door 
of  the  rainbow  chamber,  where  we  should  see, 
besides  the  snow,  such  things  as  the  white  clouds 
and  the  ocean  spray  and  the  crests  of  breaking 
waves,  and  learn  how  in  all  of  them  the  ravelled 
prism-colors  are  woven  into  white  again.     It  is 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SNOW.  27 

the  mingling  of  the  infinitely  many  reflections 
that  flash  from  the  sides  and  angles  of  the  tiny 
prisms  and  pyramids  and  stars  that  make  the 
dazzling  whiteness.  Crush  the  transparent  ice, 
and  its  grains  will  whiten  also,  for  the  same 
reason. 

And  we  will  crush  it,  for  we  ought  not  to  pass 
by  the  wondrous  structure  of  the  ice  without  a 
word  of  awe.  Ice  is  simply  a  solid  firmament, 
so  to  speak,  of  snow-stars ;  a  fossil  forest,  as  it 
were,  of  the  snow-fern  leaves,  of  that  silvery 
foliage  with  which  by  winter  moonlight  every 
window  grows  to  a  leafy  bower  of  air-plants. 
Ask  Tyndall  to  send  a  beam  of  sunlight  through 
a  l)lock  of  ice,  and  place  a  lens  in  front,  so  as  to 
catch  a  magnified  image  of  what  happens  un  his 
screen.  As  in  the  night-heavens,  when  a  wind 
sweeps  the  clouds  away,  suddenly  the  stars  ap- 
j^ear,  so  here  within  the  ice-slab  first  one  star, 
then  another,  looks  out  at  us  ;  then  the  constel- 
lations thicken  ;  and,  as  the  j^rocess  goes  on,  the 
rays  begin  to  change  to  petals,  and  presently 
the  screen  is  covered  with  the  fern-leaves.  As 
if  some  night,  Avhile  Ave  Avatched  those  old  con- 
stellations in  the  sky,  they  should  begin  to  ar- 
range themselves  in   blossom-forms  before  our 


28  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

eyes.  It  is  only  melting  ice.  What  has  hap- 
pened ?  Let  Tyndall  himself  tell :  "  Silently 
and  symmetrically  the  crystallizing  force  built 
the  atoms  up,  silently  and  symmetrically  the 
sunbeam  has  taken  them  down.  Wliat  beauty 
latent  in  a  block  of  common  ice !  And  only 
think  of  lavisli  Nature  operating  thus  through- 
out the  world.  Every  atom  of  the  solid  ice 
which  sheets  the  frozen  lakes  of  tlie  north  has 
been  fixed  according  to  this  law.  Nature  'lays 
her  beams  in  music,'  and  it  is  the  function  of 
science  to  purify  our  organs,  so  as  to  enable  us 
to  hear  the  strain." 

Will  you  step  once  more  to  the  window,  and 
watch  the  snow  come  down?  How  the  flakes 
drift  and  whirl  and  dart  and  light  and  whirl 
again  !  If  ever  chance,  if  ever  chaos,  then  here. 
And  yet  we  know  it  must  be  fact  that  not  one 
motion  of  the  little  Arabs  but  happens  under 
eternal  law ;  that  not  one  flies  or  loiters  save  as 
the  steady  forces  guide  it ;  that  every  one  is 
poised  to  its  final  place  as  surely  as  if  angel- 
hands  had  set  out  with  it  from  lieaven.  Like 
the  kindred  host  above,  God  calleth  them  all  by 
name,  and  appointeth  each  its  place. 

No  wind,  blows  but  God  knows  ; 
No  atom  falls  but  God  calls. 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SNOW.  29 

The  storm  looks  like  riot :  it  is  a  kind  of  quiet. 
It  looks  like  chaos :  it  is  perfect  cosmos.  It 
makes  us  think  of  chance ;  and  chance,  Avhen  Ave 
really  think  of  it,  resolves  itself  into  unknown 
depths  on  depths  of  law ! 

I  have  spoken  of  a  few  of  the  treasures  Avhich 
we  careless  ones  seldom  think  of  as  lying  hidden 
in  our  common  snow  :  of  the  gradual  preparation 
of  the  seasons  for  it ;  of  the  beauty  of  the  flakes, 
and  their  variety  of  forms,  and  of  the  identity 
running  througli  all  that  A'-ariety ;  of  their  secret 
architecture,  guessed  at,  never  seen ;  of  the 
poAver  necessary  to  bring  and  build  the  atoms 
so ;  of  the  careful  glory  thus  in  Avaiting  for  all 
waters,  although  the  transfiguration  may  not 
outlast  an  instant ;  of  the  kinship  of  the  ice  to 
the  heaA^en-spaces ;  and  of  the  order  in  the  riot 
of  the  storm.  The  story  would  grow  long,  if  we 
should  try  to  even  hint  the  uses  of  the  snoAv  :  to 
tell  hoAV  glaciers  haA^e  planed  and  moulded  and 
ground  the  continents  into  readiness  for  man  ; 
how  the  polar  snoAvs  send  us  out  the  air  and 
Avater-currents,  those  mighty  vehicles  on  AA^hich 
the  seasons  go  riding  around  the  planet ;  hoAv 
the  snoAA'-mountains  are  the  nurseries  of  the 
rivers  J  Iioav  the  winter-lands  have  been  in  his- 


30  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

tory  the  homesteads  of  strong,  young  races,  that 
from  time  to  time  freshened  the  earth  with  men ; 
and  how  the  snow-storms  take  care  of  all  our 
northern  vegetation,  wrapping  it  from  cold, 
while  the  hidden  life  within  gets  ready  for  its 
resurrection. 

But  all  this  we  pass  by.  Sight-seeing,  as 
every  traveller  knoAvs,  is  about  the  hardest 
work  a  man  can  do.  Let  us  draw  ourselves 
away,  and  for  a  moment  think  over  two  or 
three  thoughts  that  the  treasures  thus  far  seen 
arouse  of  him  who  is  their  Lord. 

The  first  thought  of  all  must  needs  be, —  Then 
there  is  nothing  common^  nothing  trifling^  noth- 
ing xin-ioondtrfal  in  this  universe  !  Beauty  far 
off !  Sights  in  Europe  !  Why,  here,  now,  all 
around  us,  under  our  feet,  in  the  air,  the  weed 
springing  up  unbidden  in  our  flower-pot,  the  bit 
of  sj^ar  or  sea-shell  on  our  mantel-piece,  the 
paving  stone  we  rattle  over,  the  most  familiar, 
unsightliest,  deadest  thing  that  we  can  name, 
has  more  of  God  in  it  than  we  can  ever  see. 
Explain  it  away,  and  we  have  only  explained 
a  way  through  it  to  deeper  marvels  beyond. 
"  Nothing  common  or  unclean ! "  we  may  well 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SXOW.  31 

say,  taught  by  the  wonder  of  the  great  sheet,  let 
down,  like  Peter's  in  the  vision,  through  the 
winter  air. 

Clustered  around  the  old  cathedi-a^s  abroad, 
you  often  see  old  wooden  houses  leaning  up 
against  the  sculj^tured  Avails,  like  ragged  children 
about  the  knees  of  a  great,  beautiful  saint.  We 
say  well  that  the  slianty  is  unfair  compared  with 
the  cathedral.  But  that  is  only  true  so  far  as 
man's  part  is  concerned.  Look  at  God's  part  in 
each:  the  wood-cells  and  fibres  in  the  shanty's 
walls,  grown  by  the  laws  of  plant-life,  show 
structure  even  more  complex  and  marvellous 
than  the  white  crystals  built  up  into  the  shining 
temple.     Nothing  common  or  unclean! 

Truly  see  the  contents  of  any  bit  of  time  or 
space,  and  we  feel  with  William  Blake  that 

"We  see  a  World  in  a  grain  of  sand, 
And  a  Heaven  in  a  wild-flower, 
Hold  Infinity  in  the  palm  of  our  hand. 
And  Eternity  in  an  hour !" 

To  this  thought,  that  nothing  is  insignificant 
when  really  seen,  joins  on  a  second, —  of  the 
large  place  in  the  uni^•erse  which  the  little 
things  hold.  N"ay,  when  we  think  of  it,  every- 
thing resolves  itself  to  littles.     Nature  is  noth- 


32  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

ing  but  little  things.  The  mountain  becomes 
motes  of  silex  and  calcium,  the  ocean  single 
drops  of  water,  the  prairie  single  grains  of 
alumina,  the  human  body  single  cells,  human  life 
single  thoughts  and  feelings  and  impulses.  And 
earth,  air,  fire,  water,  become,  in  turn,  atoms  of 
oxygen,  hydrogen,  nitrogen  and  the  rest.  There 
is  no  stopping-place.  When  you  have  summed 
up  what  God  does  by  means  of  his  "  little  things," 
and,  for  the  most  part,  in  utter  silence,  there 
will  be  nothing  left  to  think  of. 

The  Mahometans  have  a  story  that  once, 
when  Abraham  had  been  wronged  by  the 
hunter,  Nimrod,  Jehovah  befriended  the  patri- 
arch, and  told  him  to  select  the  animal  that 
should  be  sent  to  punish  his  enemy,  Abraham 
chose  the  fly.  And  Jehovah  said,  "  If  Abraham 
had  not  chosen  the  fly,  I  should  have  sent  a 
creature,  of  whom  a  thousand  would  not  weigh 
as  much  as  a  fly's  wing." 

We  often  say  that  God  is  infinitely  great. 
We  instinctively  look  up  to  heaven  when  we 
pray.  And  doubts  often  beset  us,  because,  to 
our  thought,  he  seems  too  large  and  too  remote 
to  be  our  God, —  to  care  for  me.  That  is  true : 
God  is  the  infinitely  great  and  infinitely  remote ; 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SNOW.  33 

but  every  whit  as  truly  lie  is  the  infinitely  little, 
and  so  the  infinitely  close.  God  the .  infinitely 
little  !  Pray  to  him !  I  do  not  mean  that  we 
can  find  out  him;  but  I  think  it  does  help  to 
make  us  feel  that  the  Great  Life  is  near. 

Think  of  the  crystals  in  which  the  sap  of 
your  trees  is  lying  locked  through  all  this  win- 
try weather, —  sap-crystals  locked  in  cells  which 
are  themselves  invisible  to  the  unaided  eye. 
God  stands  inside  those  crystals,  holding  their 
atoms  fast, —  just  as  much  as  in  the  stars! 

Think  how  that  sap  will  be  running  through 
the  hidden  channels  next  June,  and  out  to  the 
tips  of  waving  leaves,  and,  in  its  mimic  tides, 
sweeping  round  and  round  the  grains  of  green 
chlorophyl ;  so  that,  when  we  pluck  a  leaf  and 
hold  it  in  our  hand,  we  shall  really  hold  a  little 
sea  with  throbbing  life  in  it.  God  stands  and 
listens  to  the  dashings  of  those  hidden  tides! 
Docs  not  that  help  us  a  little  to  imagine  one 
who  "  measures  the  water  in  the  hollow  of  his 
hand,"  and  listens  to  "  the  music  of  the  spheres  "  ? 

Think  of  the  corpuscles  in  our  human  blood, 
of  which  It  is  calculated  that  seventy  billions 
(some  seventy  times  the  i)opulation  of  the  globe) 
lie  in    a  cubic  inch:  —  the  Power  has  counted 


84  A    YEAU    OF    MIKACLE. 

them!  Does  it  not  help  a  little  to  make  real 
the  thought  of  One  who  "  sitteth  on  the  circle 
of  the  earth,  and  the  inhabitants  thereof  are  as 
grasshoj^pers,  and  the  nations  as  the  small  dust 
of  the  earth;  who  calleth  the  stars  by  names, 
and  not  one  faileth  "  ? 

Or,  once  more,  think  of  the  creatures  that 
play  in  a  single  drop  of  ditch-water  as  the 
whales  play  in  the  Atlantic.  Each  one  of  those 
creatures  has  its  perfect  structure,  its  finished 
anatomy,  its  instincts  and  its  wants,  and  those 
wants  provided  for,  its  little  hungers  and  rages, 
its  fatigues  and  rests,  its  j^ains  and  pleasures, 
and  at  last  its  death, — who  knows  but  its  im- 
mortality also?  Thinking  of  such  things,  we 
begin  to  feel  that  perhaps  the  truth  is  God  is 
not  too  far  off,  but  too  near  for  us  to  see.  And 
God  in  all,  God  through  all,  becomes  the  living 
fact. 

And  the  more  the  universe'  has  widened  to  us 
by  the  aid  of  tliose  curved  bits  of  glass  that  we 
call  telescope  and  microscope,  and  the  more 
the  unknown  has  become  the  known,  always 
and  everywhere  Order,  Beauty,  Law  we  find. 
Always  Cosmos,  never  a  sign  of  Chaos,  never 
an   atom  fallen    out    of  the  All-Ruling   Hands! 


TREASURES    OF    THE    SXOW.  35 

No  chance  anywhere,  not  even  in  the  seeming 
riot  of  the  storm.  No  "miracle"  anywhere, 
no  breaking  of  a  law ;  but  all  a  miracle  more 
real  by  being  law.  Oneness  everywhere !  The 
laws  that  round  the  planets  rounding  the  dew- 
drop :  gravitation  in  the  snow-flake's  flutter  and 
in  the  rush  of  suns.  All  the  recent  discoveries 
and  guesses  of  science  are  but  different  paths 
by  which  we  approach  grander  points  of  view, 
whence  we  can  look  and  see  what  it  means  to 
say  that  God  is  One.  This  is  the  unity  of  Nat- 
ure, that  "  one  God,"  to  whose  recognition  the 
prophets  of  science  are  gladly  leading  us.  One- 
ness from  rims  to  centre  of  the  universe, —  rims 
that  are  nowhere,  centre  that  is  everywhere! 
And  nothing  little,  nothing  trifling;  for  all  is 
full  of  God  ! 

It  is  hard  to  prove  a  God ;  harder  to  prove 
him  our  God ;  harder  still,  perhaps,  to  prove 
our  immortality.  Yet  a  sense  as  if  there  were 
nothing  but  God  everywhere  deepens  in  us,  as 
we  enter  into  the  treasures  of  the  snow.  Like 
snow,  we,  too,  become  a  moment's  vision,  then 
we  melt  and  vanish ;  but  I  am  willing  to  trust 
for  life  and  love  while  I  know  that  the  Power 
and  Beauty  which  moulds  the  snow-flake  is 
around  me  and  is  in  me. 


36  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

Verily,  as  we  watcli  the  white  star  that  has 
fluttered  from  the  heavens  to  our  hand,  we  may 
say,  "Tlie  Lord  is  in  his  holy  temple:  let  our 
hearts  keep  silence  before  him! " 


RESURRECTION, 


n. 

RESURRECTION. 

It  is  the  Resurrection  season,  and  the  glad 
word  itself  shall  be  our  theme  to-day.  We  will 
simply  say  it  over  and  over,  and  listen  to  the 
echoes  which  it  raises  amono^  our  thousfhts.  It 
is  the  word  in  which  the  twins,  Death  and  Life, 
declare  themselves  to  be  not  two,  but  one ; 
and  the  echoes,  although  vague,  must  needs  be 
strong  and  musical,  and  they  will  bring  us  hints 
from  far. 

Not  all  from  afar,  however:  the  echo  which 
reaches  us  first,  from  the  hills  and  fields,  sounds 
near. 

Very  beautiful,  was  it  not  ?  that  picture  of 
the  opening  spring-time  which  I  gathered  from 
our  Bible,  catching  here  a  glimpse  and  there  a 
glimpse  as  it  lies  reflected  in  the  song  of  psalm- 
ist and  prophet,  and  of  Jesus,  who  had  so  often 
watched  it  as  a  boy  on  the  hills  of  Galilee. 
Doubtless  he  used  to  go  out  to  gather  early 
lilies  and  note  the  green  garments  of  the  fresh 
young   grass.     Ten    million   million  tiny  strug- 


40  A   YEAR   OF   MIRACLE. 

glers  on  our  hills  and  in  our  fields  to-day  are 
trying  to  show  ns  that  ours,  too,  is  Holy  Land. 
The  flowers  liave  begun  to  greet  us  in  our  walks, 
—  dumb  angels,  with  faces  all  a-shine  with  the 
glad  tidings  that  the  Savior-season  hath  arisen. 

Winter  we  call  the  death  of  the  year.  Its 
white  suggests  the  shroud ;  its  silence  the  hush 
of  the  saddened  house ;  its  evenness  of  aspect 
the  blank  uniformity  of  loss ;  its  cold  and  voice- 
less, yet  i^otent,  influence  the  spell  that  absence 
of  things  dear  and  wonted  lays  on  us.  Yet  to 
what  a  miracle  of  life  does  all  this  tend !  The 
swathing  and  the  silence  and  the  rest  only  hide 
the  inward  processes  by  which  the  earth,  in  its 
Avhite  chrysalis,  is  preparing  itself  for  motion 
and  color  and  sound. 

How  certain  it  is,  this  Resurrection  of  the 
spring!  Some  one  reminds  us  that,  as  the  har- 
vest approaches,  the  world  is  annually  within 
a  month  or  two  of  actual  starvation.  Let  one 
single  spring-time  drop  from  out  the  roll  of 
seasons,  and  another  would  look  on  an  earth 
full  of  silent  cities  and  very  quiet  villages,  wait- 
ing for  new  j^opulations, —  for  some  provident 
Noah  to  wander  by  that  way  and  settle  with  his 
family. 


RESURRECTION.  41 

How  punctual,  too  !  Winter  may  be  cold  or 
warm,  may  linger  or  liaste  away,  or  turn  back 
and  growl  us  out  a  snowy  good-bye  a  month 
after  we  were  thinking  he  had  gone, —  but  it 
makes  little  difference,  after  all.  The  heralds 
soon  arrive,  and  then  the  gay  procession  of  life 
marches  in  in  order.  We  can  j^redict  the  com- 
ing banners,  can  date  the  passing  weeks  by 
flower-arrivals  and  departures,  can  count  the 
quick  hours  by  flower-wakings  and  flower-clos- 
ings.    Emerson  is  but  a  trifle  too  precise :  — 

"  The  calendar 
Of  the  painted  race  of  flowers, 
Exact  to  days,  exact  to  hours, 
Is  faithful  through  a  thousand  years ; 
And  the  pretty  almanac 
Shows  the  punctual  coming  back 
On  their  due  days  of  the  birds." 

And  how  nearly  universal  the  Resurrection 
is!  The  green  tide  comes  pouring  up  from 
the  south,  pressing  over  the  hills  and  running 
through  the  river-valleys,  and  i)resently  not  one 
inch  that  can  wear  green  but  is  bathed  in  the 
living  glory.  The  trees,  swelling  with  buds, 
set  their  brown  nets  in  its  path,  and  soon  the 
meshes    are   full   of    crinkled    leafage    and    the 


42  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

white  and  crimson  of  the  blossoms ;  and  mosses 
wake  and  steal  into  their  rooty  arms,  and  the 
vines  creep  np  their  bodies.  Ko  secret  ])lace  is 
left  unvisited  by  Spring.  The  lone  plant  in  a 
desert,  the  seed  buried  under  a  dead  leaf  in  the 
wood  or  prisoned  in  the  crevice  of  a  city  pave- 
ment, the  stick-dry  bush  Ave  hung  up  in  the  cel- 
lar last  November  out  of  sight,  the  very  pota- 
toes in  the  barrel, —  all  hear  the  whisper  and 
feel  the  touch  and  turn  to  life  again.  Within 
tlie  room  of  a  sick  girl,  in  a  foul  city-garret, 
stands  a  solitary  rose  in  an  earthen  pitcher,  cut 
off,  like  a  caged  bird,  from  the  companionshij) 
of  kin.  The  Spring,  flying  over,  knows  the 
spot,  stops,  and  bids  the  plant  and  the  sick  one 
turn  again  to  life  and  beauty.  She  works  for 
no  eyes.  She  works  for  all  eyes.  The  green 
deej)  of  the  forest,  the  deej)  of  your  little  parlor- 
fernery,  turning  now  to  a  tropical  jungle, —  both 
are  alike  to  her;  and  all  her  work  is  finished 
with  equal  exquisiteness. 

Where  she  cannot  go  in  one  shape,  she  startles 
in  another.  Here,  among  us,  her  presence  is  an 
even  leafing  of  the  temperate  zone,  beneath  a 
brightening  sun.  Northward,  closer  to  the  pole, 
there  comes  a  rapid  dash  of  day  and  spring  and 


RESURRECTION.  43 

summer  all  in  one,  as  she  watches  her  chance 
to  fling  green  among  the  snows.  Elsewhere,  it 
needs  a  dimming  sun  to  bring  her.  In  inner 
California,  through  long,  rainless  months  of  heat, 
the  roots  and  bulbs  lie  dormant  underneath  the 
earth's  burnt  crust,  just  as  with  us  they  hide 
beneath  the  frozen  earth  of  winter,  Avhile  only 
thick-rinded,  juicy  evergreens  linger  above  the 
desert's  surface,— matching  the  firs  and  jnnes 
amid  our  snows.  There  the  Resurrection  season 
comes  as  the  coolest  of  the  year.  The  rain  sets 
in,  the  desert-crust  grows  cool  and  soft,  and 
suddenly,  as  if  the  rain  had  touched  them  with 
a  magic  torch,  the  j^lains  are  lit  with  color ! 

In  the  still  drier  tropics,  she  will  come,  if  she 
can  come  no  other  way,  down  the  sun-baked 
channel  of  an  emj^ty  river, —  the  spring-time 
that  the  traveller,  Baker,  saw  far  up  one  of  the 
great  branches  of  the  Nile.  lie  tells  us  how  his 
.party  had  been  travelling  weary  days  through 
the  plains  of  Upper  Egypt.  Everything  was 
death-stricken  with  the  heat :  no  grass,  no 
green  ;  the  water  of  the  river  had  shrunken  to 
little  lakes,  a  mile  or  two  long,  lying  scattered 
here  and  there  along  the  dry  bed.  And  these 
pools  swarmed  and  throbbed  with  the  concen- 


44  A   YEAR   OF    MIRACLE. 

trated  life  of  the  big  river ;  the  fish,  the  croco- 
diles and  hippopotamuses  crowding  there  to- 
gether in  unhappy  families.  One  night,  when 
the  men  Avere  camped  as  usual  in  the  sandy 
channel,  he  heard  a  dull  and  distant  noise.  It 
screw  loud  and  louder.  It  woke  the  Arabs  up, 
who  knew  the  sound  and  sprang  to  their  feet 
shouting,  "  The  river !  The  river !  "  and  scram- 
bled for  the  banks.  And  then  they  heard  the 
River  come, —  marching  down  through  the  night 
on  its  journey  to  the  sea!  When  the  morning 
broke,  a  yellow  flood,  hundreds  of  yards  across, 
rolled  at  their  feet  in  what  at  night  had  been 
a  dry  and  sunken  pathway  through  the  desert. 
Far  away,  up  in  the  mountains,  the  rainy  season 
had  begun,  and  thus  sent  greeting  to  the  plains. 
In  two  days,  the  face  of  the  whole  country  had 
changed  around  the  travellers.  Water  was  all 
that  the  solitary  place  needed  to  make  it  blos- 
som like  a  garden.  The  mimosa-trees  budded 
on  the  banks,  the  birds  found  their  way  with 
singing  to  the  branches,  the  deer  came  down  in 
companies  to  drink,  the  green  spread  and  deep- 
ened like  a  dye ;  and  it  was  spring ! 

Thus,  everywhere,  in  one  form   or  another, — 
under  ground,  dissolving  minerals  for  the  suck- 


RESURRECTION.  45 

ing  rootlets, — mounting  through  a  million  secret 
tubes  inside  young  stems  and  solid  trees, —  de- 
scending from  the  skies  in  sunshine  and  in  show- 
ers,—  riding  on  the  rivers, —  comes  Spring,  the 
Savior-season  in  the  gladness  of  the  Resurrection. 

We  will  turn  from  the  fields  and  listen  to  an- 
other echo  of  that  Avord, —  one  that  comes  from 
the  heavens  that  bend  above  them.  What  makes 
this  miracle  of  spring?  Where  does  the  spring- 
force  come  from?  And  whither  go,  when  the 
leaves  drop  and  the  flowers  pass  away  ?  How 
explain  this  steady  swing  of  seasons  by  which 
alternate  life  and  death  sweep  like  a  rising,  then 
an  ebbing,  tide  over  the  planet,  so  certainly, 
so  punctually,  so  universally  ? 

In  Greece,  six  hundred  years  before  Christ's 
day,  still  earlier  farther  east,  wise  men  perceived 
something  like  the  truth,  that  matter  and  force 
are  eternal,  that  the  words  "creation"  and  "an- 
nihilation" have  no  meaning.  They  said  that 
something  never  comes  from  nothing,  never  ends 
in  nothing;  and  they  framed  philosophies  ac- 
cordingly. But  for  ages  this  remained  a  philos- 
opher's idea.  Not  till  within  a  century  of  our 
own  time  have  the  chemists  proved  by  expert 


46  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

ments  with  weight  and  measure  that  no  atom  of 
matter  is  ever  really  lost ;  that  everything  which 
vanishes  only  vanishes  from  sights  to  enter  into 
new  combinations  and  exist  as  truly  as  before. 
And  not  till  within  the  last  few  years  h.is  an- 
other fact  begun  to  secure  its  proof,  —  that 
not  only  what  we  call  "  matter "  is  thus  inde- 
structible, but  also  what  we  call  "  force "  is 
imperishable;  since  heat  and  light,  electricity 
and  magnetism,  cheraic  and  vital  force,  are  all  of 
them  but  varying  forms  of  one  and  the  same 
great  force.  The  "  correlation  of  forces," —  so  its 
discoverers  have  named  the  mighty  secret  which  at 
last  reveals  to  us  the  depths  of  meaning  in  man's 
old  word,  "uni-verse."  Correlated  forces, —  that 
is  to  say,  each  07ie  dies  into  the  others  when  it 
disappears  as  itself:  one  sole  Force  abiding  as 
the  *'I  AM."  In  uttering  that,  we  stand  in  the 
very  heart,  the  inmost  miracle,  of  the  Resurrec- 
tion process ! 

Take  any  common  movement  that  we  have 
ceased  to  wonder  at,  thinking  we  know  all  about 
it ;  trace  it  back  and  see  the  dyings  of  force 
from  one  form  and  its  rebirths  in  another.  You 
have  a  clock  on  the  mantel-piece  in  your  parlor. 
Whence  get  the  hands  of  the  clock  their  mo- 


RESURRECTION.  47 

tion  ?  From  the  force  of  gravitation  in  the 
leaden  weights  or  of  elasticity  in  the  steel 
spring.  Whence  came  that  force  into  the 
weights  or  spring?  Out  of  your  contracting 
muscles  as  they  wound  it  up.  So  the  power  is 
already  outside  of  the  clock,  and  in  your  arm. 
Whence  came  this  vital,  muscular  force  into 
your  arm  ?  It  is  the  chemic  force  that  lurked 
in  the  beef  you  eat  for  dinner.  The  butcher 
and  the  baker  brought  it  to  you,  the  farmer  sent 
it.  And  before  it  Avas  you,  that  meat  was  ox ; 
before  it  was  ox,  it  was  grass ;  before  it  was 
grass,  it  was  mineral  in  the  earth,  and  gas  in 
the  air,  and  water.  But  what  so  marvellously 
wrought  up  the  chemic  force  in  gas  and  mineral 
to  chemic  force  in  me  ?  The  sun's  heat  did  it ! 
Nay,  that  chemic  force,  it  is  supposed,  is  itself 
the  sun's  ray,  transformed  from  the  power  that 
darts  through  space  to  that  which  holds  the 
atoms  of  the  elements  fast-locked  together. 
Somewhat  thus  the  men  of  science  tell  the  story. 
The  busy  creeping  of  the  clock's  hands  round 
their  little  circle  is  traced  out  of  the  clock, 
out  of  me  who  wind  it  up,  out  of  the  food  that 
made  me,  out  of  the  earth  which  produced  the 
food,  back,  back,  to  the  great  time-measurer  in 


48  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

the  heavens.  The  sun  wmds  up  our  watches! 
And  whence  got  the  sun  its  heat  ?  Perhaps  by 
the  constant  condensation  of  its  vast  body,  pos- 
sibly by  the  striking  of  vast  hordes  of  whirling 
meteors  on  its  surface.  Both  theories  may  be 
doubted,  and  be  supj^lanted  by  new  theories; 
but,  on  any  theory,  we  have  now  to  follow 
our  clock's  creep  beyond  our  sun  to  the  vast 
interstellar  spaces  where  the  world-systems 
gather  themselves  together  from  nebula3,  and 
myriads  of  suns  charm  their  planets  to  attentive 
courses. 

Is  it  not  very  wonderful?  Forever  and  for- 
ever,—  there  is  no  stopping  in  the  vast  journey, 
if  Ave  ask  the  wherefore  of  the  simplest  motion 
that  our  eyes  perceive.  Nothing  Avasted,  noth- 
ing lost;  each  particle  accounted  for ;  each  pulse 
of  light  or  heat  or  electricity  forever  doing  its 
appointed  work  in  ceaseless  resurrections;  at 
each  birth  exactly  reproducing  in  new  forms 
that  which  had  ceased  in  old  ones. 

And,  if  we  could  Avatch  Avith  eyes  all-seeing, 
we  should  expect  to  Avatch  those  Avorld-systems 
themselves  coming  and  going  like  the  leaves 
upon  our  trees,  like  the  human  generations, — 
systems    evolving,    and    dissolving,    and    then 


RESURRECTION.  49 

again  evolving,  in  endless  cycles  of  cosmic  re- 
production. 

Such  is  the  great  Resurrection  Psalm  which 
modern  science  reverently  sings.     We  find   its 
noble  verse  in   such    chapters   as   Tyndall    and 
Spencer  write.     To  go  back,  then,  to  the  fields 
and    answer    our    question,    Wliat    makes    the 
spring-force?     That  which  is  true  of  the  clock 
upon    the    mantel    is    but   more    magnificently 
true  of  our  spring-tirfie  on  the  earth.     The  mo- 
tion of  our  May,  vast  as  it  is  and  beautiful,  is 
but  a  little  stir  in  the  eternal  Resurrection  proc- 
ess by  which   the   sun  mothers  all   motion    on 
the  earth.     A  little  more,  a  little  less  of   sun- 
light,—  that   is  all  that  makes  the  play  of  sea- 
sons.    The  earth,  in  its  round,  places  itself  so 
that  the  rays  fall  more  vertically  on  its  surface, 
and  the  deed  is  done !     Only  that  and  nothing 
more,  and,  lo !  the  south  winds  blow  ;  the  rivers 
run ;  the  frozen  ground  turns  into  flowers ;  the 
trees  break   forth  at  every  inch    into  leaf-life; 
the   pilgrim  birds  arrive,  singing   and   mating; 
the    children   are    shouting   in   the    street;    the 
young  men  and  maidens  are  marrying ;  the  old 
people  are  thanking  God  that  the  rheumatism 
has  left  their  bones ;  the  poor  are  easy  and  hope- 


50  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

f ul  again ;  the  armies  are  moving ;  the  wars  be- 
gin again;  and  all  the  comedies  and  tragedies 
of  plant  and  animal  and  human  life  are  in  full 
play  once  more.  Sun's  heat, —  that  is  all  that 
has  done  it!  And  each  transformation  of  the 
force,  from  the  time  it  issues  from  the  sun 
in  lightning  thrills  to  the  time  it  quickens  the 
pulsing  of  a  sick  child's  bipod,  or  stirs  as  nerve- 
force  in  the  cells  of  the  poet's  brain, —  what  is 
it  but  a  vanishing  to  reappear,  a  dying  into  a 
Resurrection  ? 

Let  us  leave  the  world  of  fields  and  skies,  and 
enter  that  of  man.  Here,  if  we  speak  our  word 
and  listen,  it  will  echo  for  us  from  every  part  of 
human  experience. 

We  hear  it  grandly  in  the  fate  of  nations. 
One  blots  out  another  by  conquest,  then  that 
vanisher  rises  again  by  the  slow  absorption  of  its 
civilization.  The  old  cultures  of  the  race  are 
thus  secured  and  handed  down  in  cycles  of 
rhythmic  history.  Hebrew  absorbs  Canaanite, 
and  Persia  absorbs  Babylon,  Egypt  and  Asia 
Minor  and  Persia  yield  to  Greece,  and  Greece 
to  Rome,  and  Rome  to  barbarous  Goth  and 
Frank;  and  throughout  the  process  Man  saves 


RESURRECTION.  51 

his  own,  and  the  forces,  mental  and  moral,  are 
guided  to  the  finer  issues  of  modern  Europe 
and  America.  The  brains  that  planned  the 
pyramids,  the  bravery  of  the  warriors  at  Troy, 
the  enthusiasm  of  the  Crusader,  are  hoarded  in 
the  broadened  intellect  and  nobler  ideals  and 
fairer  ingtincts  of  the  children  of  to-day. 

We  hear  another  echo,  another  series  of 
echoes,  repeated  from  every  individual  life. 
07ie  death  we  die?  Why,  Ave  die  from  one 
day  to  another.  We  only  live  by  dying.  The 
doctors  say  our  very  bodies  are  changed,  atom 
by  atom,  every  few  years;  that  you  are  not 
quite  the  same  persons  you  Avere  Avhen  you  met 
here  the  last  time.  And  do  not  all  mothers 
know  what  it  is  to  lose  their  children's  faces, 
not  by  a  death-day,  but  by  the  swift  birthday 
circling  round  ? 

In  mind,  in  character,  who  doubts  our  fact? 
A  young  man  grasps,  at  last,  the  real  purpose 
of  his  life,  a  girl  leaves  her  school  and  enters 
on  home  duties ;  what  is  that  but  a  dying  of 
the  boy  and  girl,  a  Resurrection  to  the  man,  the 
woman  ?  Then,  perhaps,  they  awake  to  the  feel- 
ing that  they  are  living  lives  of  busy  selfishness 
and  uselessness  and  sin;  and  with  deep  heart- 


52  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

searching  and  repenting,  with  prayer  and  vow 
and  earnest  struggle,  they  consecrate  themselves 
to  something  better.  It  is  the  fairest  of  all  the 
Resurrections, —  a  dying  of  the  poor  self,  a  rising 
to  the  nobler  self.  Friends  well  name  it  the 
revival,  the  new  birth. 

Half-way  between  their  birthday  and  their 
death-day,  this.man  and  this  woman  stand  side 
by  side  before  the  minister.  They  call  it  "  Aved- 
ding-day  "  :  it  is  their  Resurrection-day !  What 
dies?  Two  separate  selves.  Two  separate 
homes,  that  now  are  breaking  up.  What  comes 
to  birth  ?  Two  lives  in  one.  A  new  home.  A 
new  family.  A  new  starting-pomt  for  births 
and  deaths,  for  joys  and  tragedies,  for  obedi- 
ence to  laws  of  love  and  life,  and  nobler 
growth  thereby,  or  for  breaking  of  those  laws 
and  thereby  growing  ruin.  Can  they  fully 
know,  these  two,  the  solemn  act  of  Life-in-Death 
in  which  they  join,  so  brimful  with  consequence? 
Not  they ! 

While  they  are  finding  out,  the  years  pass  on, 
and  our  man  and  woman  are,  once  more,  two, — 
for  one  of  them  is  here,  one  gone.  And  again 
there  is  a  Resurrection  to  be  watched,  A  voice 
is  gone,  yet,  hark!  its  tones  are  "  rising"  in  those 


RESURRECTION.  53 

clifldren's  voices  ringing  out  at  play.  A  smile 
is  gone;  yet  there  it  lurks  around  the  fresh 
young  lips  and  eyes.  The  pose  of  the  head,  the 
motion  of  the  body,  the  liabits  of  the  hands 
still  linger  in  the  home.  The  mother  or  the 
father  is  dead,  but  the  mother's  love  or  the 
father's  honor  has  "  risen  "  in  the  form  of  fam- 
ily-ideals to  shape  new  lives  of  gentle  deeds  and 
manly  ways. 

Is  it  ever  otherwise  ?  We  read  of  Theodore 
Parker,  that,  as  he  lay  on  his  death-bed  in  Flor- 
ence, in  a  wandering  mood  he  grasped  the  hand 
of  a  friend,  and  said  eagerly :  "  I  have  something 
to  tell  you:  there  are  two  Theodore  Parkers 
now.  One  is  dying  here  in  Italy ;  the  other  I 
have  planted  in  America.  He  will  live  there 
and  finish  my  Avork."  3Iany  a  wanderer  from 
the  beaten  creed-paths  has  found  that  "other" 
Parker  sown  through  the  wide  land,  and  blessed 
the  risen  messenger  that  showed  him  God  afresh. 
I  think  it  is  never  otherwise.  Truly,  the  chem 
ists  of  history  cannot  weigh  and  count  and 
prove  ;  but,  seeing  what  we  do  of  the  laws  of 
Life-in-Death,  we  have  a  faith  to  say  that  in  the 
world  of  mind,  as  in  that  of  matter,  N'ature 
gathers    up    the    fragments   so  that    nothing   is 


54  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

lost, —  no  thouglit  or  feeling  or  ideal  perish- 
ing utterly,  any  more  than  atoms  or  vibrations 
physical. 

But  there  is  borne  to  us,  thinking  of  such  van- 
ished friends,  one  echo  more,  the  most  mys- 
terious of  all.  Let  us  listen  to  it  quietly  and 
reverently. 

Ah  !  if  we  could  interpret  that  word  "  Resur- 
rection "  fuXly^  and  not  in  dim,  far  hints,  we 
should  fathom  the  depths  of  consciousness  and 
unconsciousness.  "  Birth  "  and  "  Death  "  would 
be  new  words  to  us ;  not  events  of  beginning 
and  ending,  but  instants  in  an  eternal  process 
of  Becoming.  If  we  could  interpret  that  word 
fully,  it  would  explain  not  only  the  mystery 
beyond,  but  that  mystery  which  is  past.  We 
should  find  out  the  whence  and  the  liow  of  this 
body's  Resurrection  to  its  present  form.  Where 
was  our  body 

"  lu  the  beautiful  repose 

That  it  had  hefore  its  birth, 
With  tlie  ruby,  with  the  rose, 

With  the  harvest,  earth  in  earth  "  ? 

How  came  it  that  our  dust  was  not  the  ruby, 
was  not  rose,  was  not  part  of  some  golden  har- 


RESURRECTION.  55 

vest  ?  How  came  it  that,  Avhen  we  rose,  we  rose 
as  baby-man  and  baby-woman,  as  Nellie,  John 
and  Willie  ? 

"  The  Soul  that  rises  with  us,  our  life's  Star, 
Hath  had  elsewhere  its  setting, 
And  cometh  from  afar." 

O  that  we  had  some  angel  of  the  Resurrection 
to  tell  us  what  we  were  in  the  immortality  that 
lies  behind  us  !  And  how  Ave  came  from  that 
to  this ;  what  death  we  died  to  reach  tliis  life ; 
what  forgotten  pains  we  have  passed  through, 
and  what  joys;  and  how  much  of  that  old  ex- 
perience we  have  brought  with  us !  Have  we, 
buried  in  us,  like  the  trees,  rings  of  many  sea- 
sons of  rebirths  and  redeaths?  And  does  our 
hope  of  immortality  lie  rooted  in  a  memory? 
Is  the  seed's  dream  of  the  flower  it  will  be  a 
dim  consciousness  of  blossom-tints  that  have 
enfolded  it,  and  of  free  wmds  it  once  knew 
upon  the  tree-top  ?  Have  we  come  up,  or  come 
down,  to  this  new  life  on  earth ;  been  some  time 
more  than  we  are  now ;  and  are  we  limping 
Lucifers  fallen  by  some  prenatal  sin  to  human 
incarnation,  or  stand  we  now  upon  the  topmost 
step  of  being  we  have  ever  touched  ?  Are  we 
as  wakers  to  our  past,  and    is  that   the   reason 


56  A    YEA II    OK    MIRACLK. 

that  it  lies  so  vngue  and  dim  ?  Are  we  as 
sleeping  dreamers  to  our  future,  and  is  that  the 
reason  that  it  lies  so  dim?  Are  we  always 
passing  from  a  night  into  a  morning,  which  is 
still  but  night  to  the  brighter  days  that  lie  be- 
yond? It  is  question  upon  question,  and  no 
answer !  At  least,  the  only  angels  tliat  give 
answer  are  this  same  curious  mind  in  us  that 
asks  the  question, —  this  thirsting  aspiration  to 
be  yet  more, —  this  love  that  clings, —  this  sense 
of  duty  that  seems  as  if  it  never  could  be  born 
and  never  die,  but  always  must  have  been  to 
always  be, —  this  inward  voice  of  "  Life  !  Life  !  " 
that  haunts  us  so  forever.  No  answer  more 
than  that. 

But,  I  think,  it  helps  us,  in  doubts  we  have 
about  our  future  life,  to  remember  how  almost 
completely  the  two  mysteries  are  one, —  that 
which  shrouds  the  Resurrection  which  has  been 
at  birth  to  make  us  what  Ave  are,  and  that 
around  tlie  Kesurrection  that  shall  be.  Solve 
the  first,  and  you  have  solved  the  last.  Nay, 
tell  me  what  I  am  to-day,  and  you  have  proba- 
bly solved  both.  The  deej^  secret  is  not  the 
secret  of  the  future,  but  the  secret  of  becoming 
one  thing   from  having  been  another.     Deej^er 


RESURRECTION.  67 

yet,  the  mystery  of  being  at  all.  But  that  "  be- 
coming one  thing  from  having  been  another," — 
it  is  the  common  mystery  of  growth.  The 
processes  which  we  cease  to  w^onder  at  because 
they  go  on  all  the  time  under  our  eyes,  by 
which  a  few  pounds  of  soft  and  winking  baby- 
hood become  the  Napoleon  or  Daniel  "Webster 
who  shape  the  nations;  these  processes  by  which 
we  differ  to-day  from  what  we  were  Avhen  the 
last  flowers  were  in  the  fields, —  are  part  of  that 
same  miracle  of  growth,  of  becoming,  of  which 
birth  and  death,  whatever  they  may  be,  are  cer- 
tainly but  other  parts.  We  can  trace  the  process, 
one  little  inch  of  it.  But  that  is  a  wholly  differ- 
ent thing  from  explaining  even  that  inch.  If 
I  could  but  explain  myself  as  I  am,  or  the  dif- 
ference between  myself  of  to-day  and  myself 
of  yesterday,  I  should  doubtless  have  a  stronger 
argument  for  my  immortality  than  any  that  the 
thinkers  yet  have  framed. 

Why  do  we,  then,  concentrate  our  Avonder 
on  one  moment  in  the  horizon  of  our  time-view, 
and  sorrowfully  call  that  narrowed  wonder 
"doubt  about  our  immortality"?  Look  be- 
hind, and  explain  the  moment  when  you  rose 
on  the  verge  of   the  horizon  in  that  direction. 


58  A  YEAR   OF   MIRACLE. 

A  daily,  momently  rising  has  made  us  the  be- 
ings that  now  stand  in  our  footprints.  That 
instantly  recurring  Resurrection  will  go  on  till, 
again,  what  they  call  2is  will  go  below  the  strain- 
ing vision  of  our  friends.  And  what  then? 
Why  comes  then  the  doubt  for  the  first  time 
with  a  startling  horror,  "  What  if  there  be  no 
resurrection  of  the  dead  ?  "  Kay  :  standing 
amid  the  greatness  of  this  Kesurrection  thought, 
we  begin  to  feel,  in  spite  of  all  our  ignorance, 
that  there  is  no  meaning  in  that  word  "  dead ! " 
Nothing  in  death  can  he  stranger  than  every- 
thing in  life.  The  *'  argument "  for  all  we  want 
in  immortality  is  unattaining :  it  falls  far  short 
of  the  questions  to  which  we  long  to  have  an 
answer.  But  nearly  every  man  who  thinks 
amid  his  trust,  and  yet  knows  that  he  does 
trust  and  is  happy  amid  his  thinking,  comes 
probably  to  two  convictions  as  his  final  state- 
ments,—  this  for  one:  All  of  me  there  is,  has 
ever  been,  and  all  will  ever,  be,  each  atom  and 
each  impulse  of  me,  whatever  new  form  atom 
or  impulse  take.  And  this,  too,  one  feels  sure 
of  with  a  mighty  sureness, —  that  the  facts  about 
that  unknown  future  form,  whatever  they  may 
be,  lie  within  the  Eternal   Goodness,  and   are, 


RESURRECTION.  59 

therefore,  surely  better  thnn  our  best  hope  about 
them.  My  brightest  hope  is  ignorance  still. 
My  trust  in  Goodness  —  to  me  that  does  not 
seem  like  ignorance.  That  trust,  and  the  Res- 
urrection at  my  birth,  so  strange,  so  unremem- 
bered,  hinting  at  so  much  life  unknown  behind, 
are,  as  it  were,  God's  affidavit  that  I  need  not 
fear  about  the  Resurrections  to  come. 

Thank  God,  then,  friends,  for  the  Resurrection 
thoughts  which  the  spring  months  bring  to  us ! 
We  die  to  live  again.  We  die  that  ice  may 
live  again.  Nothing  is  quickened  save  it  die. 
Mortality  is  the  condition  of  all  immortality. 
What  echoes  we  have  wakened  of  this  truth ! 
The  oj^ening  spring  prints  it  off  on  every  hillside 
in  illuminated  text  of  leaf  and  flower.  The 
suns  in  the  heaven  are  blazing  it.  The  nations 
in  their  history  repe  :t  it.  The  sin-experience  in 
which  we  first  find  God  reveals  it.  The  passing 
moment  of  each  main's  and  woman's  life  is  ring- 
ing gladly  with  it.  Our  dead  friend's  memory  re- 
calls it.  The  mystery  of  each  instant's  life  flashes 
it  far  backward  through  the  past,  far  forward 
through  the  future.  We  find,  as  always  with 
these  central  facts  of  Nature,  that  the  best  and 


60  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

highest  meaning  of  the  truth  belongs  to  our- 
selves,—  so  completely  is  Man  a  part  of  all,  so 
completely  is  all  represented  in  Man.  Our  word 
"  Resurrection  "  seems  to  concentrate  the  history 
of  the  universe,  to  whisper  the  secret  of  the 
life  of  God  ! 

And  as  we  think  of  all  these  things,  those 
words  which  I  read  you  awhile  ago  fill  and  throb 
with  their  tides  of  meanino; :  — 

Praise  ye  the  Lord,  all  things  that  die!  Ye 
die  that  ye  may  live  again. 

Praise  ye  him,  sun  and  moon,  that  yet  shall 
fade! 

Praise  him  all  ye  stars  of  light,  whose  light 
shall  yet  be  quenched  ! 

Praise  the  Lord,  O  earth,  so  full  of  changing 
deaths!  Praise  him,  fire  and  hail,  snow  and 
vapors,  and  stormy  winds,  each  vanishing  as  ye 
fulfil  his  word ! 

Praise  him,  mountains  and  all  hills,  that  ytt 
shall  melt! 

Praise  him,  beasts  and  all  birds  !  Praise  him, 
young  men  and  maidens,  old  men  and  children ! 
Let  everything  that  hath  the  breath  of  life 
praise  the  Lord ;  for  all  shall  die,  that  all  may 
live  again  ! 

Praise  ye  the  Lord  ! 


FLOWERS. 


in. 

FLOWERS. 

"  Consider  the  lilies,  how  they  grow,"  said 
Jesus ;  "  they  toil  not,  they  spin  not, —  yet  Solo- 
mon in  all  his  glory  Avas  not  arrayed  like  one 
of  these." 

One  summer  day  I  happened  into  a  flower  ex- 
hibition. A  placard  gave  notice  that  the  subject 
of  the  day's  discussion  was  to  be  "  The  Lily " ; 
and  relying  on  the  word  of  Jesus  as  a  pass,  I 
went  in  obediently  to  hear  the  garden-men  "con- 
sider the  lilies,  how  they  grow."  The  Japan 
lily  was  the  special  subject  of  the  talk:  how 
could  the  stranger  best  be  made  to  grow  among 
ourselves  ?  One  man  told  of  his  greenhouse 
luck,  and  another  of  his  pot-luck,  and  the  next 
one  talked  of  soils,  and  so  on,  round  the  circle. 
And  all  the  while  the  superb  things  stood  upon 
their  stalks  and  looked  at  us,  no  king  in  all  his 
glory  arrayed  like  one  of  them  ! 

That  word  of  Jesus  is  almost  the  only  tender 


64  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

word  about  flowers  in  all  the  Bible.  In  the 
books  of  the  Apocrypha,  and  in  the  Song  of  Solo- 
mon, roses  and  lilies  are  mentioned  twice  or 
thrice  in  the  lover's  way ;  but  the  Hebrew  feel- 
ing for  Nature  was  rather  a  feeling  of  its  sub- 
limity than  of  its  beauty.  The  sun  and  stars, 
the  mountains  and  the  desert  and  the  sea,  the 
rains,  the  lightning  and  the  earthquake,  these 
stand  forth  in  the  Old  Testament  imagery.  And 
trees  were  loved,  and  fruit  was  praised.  But 
grass  and  leaves  are  scarcely  spoken  of  save  as 
the  emblem  of  withering,  —  "  All  flesh  is  grass," 
"  We  all  do  fade  as  a  leaf."  When  the  Hebrew 
thought  of  fragrance,  he  thought  of  myrrh  and 
frankincense  rather  than  of  roses ;  and  when  he 
thought  of  beauty,  a  gem  rather  than  a  blossom 
was  the  wonder  to  his  eye.  Many  a  flash  of 
ruby  and  sapphire  and  emerald  gleams  from  the 
Bible  pages.  The  wall  of  the  Ncav  Jerusalem 
is  built  up  of  them,  and  its  twelve  gates  "are 
twelve  pearls.  In  that  city  is  a  tree  of  life,  and 
it  has  twelve  fruits  indeed, —  but  never  a  word 
of  flowers  in  the  heaven  on  earth  that  was  to  be. 
Paul  was  too  earnest  in  his  gospel  of  re2:)entance, 
and  too  deep  in  the  revelation  of  the  mystery  of 
the  love  of  God  in  Christ  to  think  of  the  love  of 


FLOWERS.  65 

God  to  the  hillsides  and  the  good  news  revealed 
in  wild-flowers.  So  this  little  word  of  Jesus 
stands  almost  alone  to  make  us  know  that  there 
was,  at  least,  one  pair  of  eyes  in  Palestine  that 
saw  the  Father  everywhere.  It  is  one  of  the 
verses  that  show  that  Jesus  was  no  common 
man. 

Yet  Jesus  "considered"  the  outside  beauty 
only,  I  suppose.  Those  garden-men  I  spoke  of, 
who  knew  of  the  tireless  toil  by  which  the  plant- 
cells  are  built  up  from  the  soil,  and  the  won- 
drous spinning  of  plant-fibres,  and  the  secret 
weddings  of  the  flowers,  were  considering  mys- 
teries of  growth  of  which  he  could  not  have 
dreamed.  Who  loved  the  lily  best?  Those 
who  know  its  wonder  best  can  love  it  best,  no 
doubt;  and  so,  I  trust,  the  garden-men.  Yet 
that  were  only  possible,  if  the  other  love,  the 
Jesus-love,  the  poet's,  the  worshipper's  love,  were 
joined  to  their  science.  No  worship  like  the 
worship  of  science  when  it  does  worship ! 

What  would  summer  be  without  the  flowers ! 
And  yet  a  summer  with  flowers  is  a  modern  im- 
provement. For  ages  and  ages,  through  far  the 
greater  part  of  its  life  thus  far,  a  flowerless  earth 


66  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

has  turned  its  sombre  face  up  to  the  sun.  It 
liad  not  learned  to  smile.  Even  the  summers  of 
the  ages  to  which  we  owe  our  coal-beds  had  no 
flowers,  no  fruit-blossoms,  no  grass,  and,  of  course, 
no  bees  and  no  song-birds  in  them  !  All  the 
plants,  the  wise  men  say,  were  like  our  ferns  or 
club-mosses  or  meadow-horsetails, —  only  "  there 
were  giants  in  those  days," — or  else  like  our 
cone-bearing  trees ;  all  reproducing  in  the  secret 
way  the  ferns  still  know,  or  the  quiet  way  the 
pine-cones  have.  Not  till  long  ages  afterwards 
did  the  Junes  bear  blossoms. 

Thinking  of  that,  we  can  hardly  say  "the 
good  old  times  !  "  We  thank  Heaven  that  tlie 
birds  and  flowers  came  before  us.  Indeed,  the 
earth  had  to  be  ripe  for  them  before  it  could  be 
ripe  for  us.  So  here  we  are  to-day,  and  the 
whole  land,  all  the  summer  through,  laughs  for 
us  in  grass  and  flowers, —  that  peal  beginning  in 
anemones  and  violets,  rising  into  roses,  and 
ending  in  the  golden-rod  and  asters.  Great 
tribes  of  beings  have  been  already  born,  and 
others  are  on  their  way  to  being,  to  peoj^le 
the  planet  with  color  and  beauty. 

What  place  on  it  shall  have  the  fairest? 
Where  will  the  Great  Gardener  walk  and  work 


FLOWERS.  67 

most  fondly  ?  On  the  broad  stretches  of  prai- 
rie-floor, paved  with  gay  mosaic  ?  Or  in  the  se- 
cret places  of  the  woods  ?  Or  on  the  tiny  farms 
that  hardly  seem  to  dot  the  New  England  land- 
scape, although  Massachusetts  is  the  crowded 
corner  of  America  ?  No,  none  of  these, —  for 
Dr.  Hayes  (was  it?)  says  he  never  saw  such 
beautiful  wild-flowers  as  in  the  Arctic  zone, 
where  the  summer  is  almost  counted  by  the 
hours!  And  Ruskin,  with  his  mountain-love, 
claims  the  noblest  for  the  uplands.  The  grass 
grows  nowhere  softer  and  greener  than  on  the 
Alpine  pastures,  or  in  the  glacier  meadoAvs  of 
our  own  Sierras,  meadows  set  nine  thousand  feet 
above  sea-level ;  and  right  out  of  the  Swiss 
glaciers,  nestled  by  eternal  snows,  spring  rocks 
whose  bright  tops  are  gardens  of  anemones  and 
gentians.  But  the  lovers  of  the  ocean,  mean- 
while, tell  us  that  nowhere  do  the  colors  glow 
and  deepen  so,  as  where  the  sea-winds  feed  them. 
The  reddest  wild  roses  I  ever  saw  grew  out  of 
the  graves  of  the  old  Puritan  ministers  of  Mar- 
blehead,  who  lie  in  a  row  among  the  rocks  of 
the  quiet,  seaward  burying-ground.  Or  what 
think  you  of  the  great  central  plain  of  Califor- 
nia in  flower-time  ?     For  six  months  of  the  year 


68  ■       A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

it  is  a  scorched  and  dust-swept  desert.  In  April 
it  becomes  one  flower-bed,  nearly  four  hundred 
miles  long  and  thirty  wide,  lying  at  the  feet  of 
the  snow-mountains.  A  traveller  writes  of  it : 
"  Go  where  I  would,  east,  west,  north,  south,  1 
still  plashed  and  rippled  in  flower-gems.  More 
than  a  hundred  flowers  touched  my  feet  at  every 
step,  closing  above  them  as  if  I  were  wading  in 
water."  To  count  the  riches,  he  gathered  the 
harvest  of  one  square  yard  of  the  plain,  taken 
at  random  like  a  cupful  of  water  from  a  lake  ; 
and  it  gave  more  than  seven  thousand  distinct 
flower-heads,  besides  one  thousand  stems  of 
silky  grasses, —  these  rising  from  an  inch-deep 
velvet  floor,  containing,  by  estimate,  a  million  of 
the  tiny  cups  and  hoods  that  we  call  mosses  ! 

And  wliat  a  marvel  is  each  one  of  all  the 
myriad  millions  in  its  individual  make  and  stat- 
ure !  Think  what  the  mathematics  of  the  leaf- 
arrangement  imply, —  that  every  leaf  on  every 
budding  tree  in  each  whole  spring  is  set  in  its 
place  by  law !  that  not  one  has  stumbled  to 
its  twig,  or  to  its  station  on  the  twig,  by  any 
accident !  and  that  this  same  ordered  stationing 
is  traceable  all  through  the  close  phalanx  of  the 
pine-cone's   scales,   and    determines   where  the 


FLOWERS.  69 

limbs  shall  start  on  every  tree,  and  the  very 
spot  within  the  blossom  where  each  stamen  shall 
droop  or  nod  ! 

These  last  words,  linking  leaves,  limbs  and 
blossoms,  touch  the  deepest  flower-secret  that 
has  thus  far  been  discovered.  The  school-boys 
know  it  now,  but  the  wisest  men  were  just 
knowing  enough  a  century  ago  to  guess  it.  It 
is  the  secret  that  the  botanists  call  "metamor- 
phosis,"—  the  secret  that  each  and  every  organ 
of  the  flower  is  but  a  transformed  leaf;  that 
bud-scale  and  bract  and  sepal  and  petal  and 
stamen  and  pistil,  back  to  the  new  bud-scale,  in 
spite  of  all  the  difference  of  their  forms  and  all 
their  varied  tints,  are  but  successive  leaf-trans- 
figurations. Economic  Nature  gets  her  new 
effects,  not  by  selecting  new  themes,  but  by 
playing  variations  on  the  old  themes ;  when  she 
would  make  a  blossom  on  an  apple-tree  or  on  a 
pasture-weed,  she  only  shortens  and  alters  what 
would  else  have  been  a  common  leafy  branch. 
How  do  we  know  this  ?  By  tracing  the  cous- 
inship  of  each  pair  of  neighbor  organs  through 
graded  series  of  transitional  forms;  by  watch- 
ing the  conversion  and  the  reconversion  of  these 
organs  into  each  other  in  domesticated  double 


70  A   YEAR   OF   MIRACLE. 

flowers;  by  studying  the  cases  of  monstrosity 
that  so  often  blab  Nature's  riddles  and  reveal 
the  latent  tendencies  of  beings :  on  such  full 
evidence  as  this  we  know  it. 

But,  not  content  with  such  transfiguration, 
the  Mother  of  all  beauty  takes  up  the  separate 
organs,  and  tenderly  carries  out  her  variations 
on  each  one.  She  bears  fixed  laws  in  mind  and 
never  really  forgets  her  arithmetic, —  the  rules 
of  twos  and  threes  and  fours  and  fives ;  but  by 
multiplying  parts,  by  dividing  parts,  by  joining 
them  at  this  place  on  their  edges,  then  at  that, 
by  enlarging  some  and  making  others  smaller, 
by  their  complete  abortion  sometimes,  by  mould- 
ing horns  and  cups,  by  unfurling  wings,  by  hang- 
ing bells,  by  ravelling  fringes  out,  by  all  sorts 
of  dainty  devices  of  sculpture,  she  makes  the 
myriad  distinct  species  of  miracles  that  men 
stare  at  untiringly  as  the  flowers  of  spring.  It 
is  rare  luck,  in  some  classic  land,  to  turn  up  from 
the  soil  the  fragment  of  a  marble  st  itue  of  old 
beauty.  But  Nature  flings  her  carvings  every- 
where,—  each  one  comj^lete  and  fresh  and  per- 
fect for  its  niche,  and  such  a  joy  that,  were  it 
the  lone  one  of  its  race,  it  would  draw  the  peo- 
ple into  pilgrimages  for  its  worship. 


FLOWERS.  71 

Sl)e  paints  them,  too.  If  any  one  seem  ugly 
as  a  whole,  place  a  bit  of  it  under  the  micro- 
scope, and  see  what  firmaments  of  color,  what 
mines  of  sparkling  gems,  you  have  burst  into. 
Under  the  lens,  a  quarter-inch  of  rosy  petal 
flushes  and  spreads  like  a  sunset  sky !  A  mot- 
tled streak  turns  into  a  glorious  sunrise !  You 
can  think  of  nothing  else  for  fit  comparison. 
And  then,  instead  of  voice,  she  gives  them 
fragrance.  They  have  no  speech  or  language; 
but  in  this  way  their  music  "goes  forth  through 
all  the  earth  and  their  Avords  to  the  end  of  the 
world."  Unless,  indeed,  Huxley's  fancy  be  fact, 
and  by  ears  fine  enough  (possibly  only  insect- 
fine)  a  voice,  also,  could  be  heard, —  the  music 
of  running  sap,  sound  such  as  streams  have  that 
run  through  secret  channels.  If  so,  what  cho- 
ruses rise  through  all  the  fields  that  some  one 
hears ! 

But  what  is  all  this  lavish  sculpture  and  paint- 
ing and  fragrance  for,— lavished  on  the  waste, 
where  no  man  is,  as  well  as  in  the  garden-bed ; 
lavished  on  the  blossom's  inmost  slopes  and 
curves,  where  human  eyes  cannot  detect  it,  as 
much  as  on  the  inch  of  outward  surface?     We 


72  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

used  to  account  for  it  as  sign  of  God's  delight 
in  beauty  in  itself.     We  used  to  say, 

"  If  eyes  were  made  for  seeing, 
Then  Beauty  is  its  own  excuse  for  being." 

But  to-day,  again,  brings  forward  a  new  and 
richer  thought,  that  all  this  beauty  and  fragrance 
is  but  a  path  to  use.  We  can  plainly  see  that 
all  the  energy  of  the  plant  goes  to  secure  repro- 
duction, that  all  the  parts  of  the  flower  subserve 
the  purpose  of  seed-making.  Deep  hidden  with- 
in the  flower's  heart  lies  the  little  nursery  where 
the  seeds  are  to  be  born ;  most  cunningly  ihe 
pistil  and  the  stamen  watch  each  other  like  true 
lovers  for  a  greeting ;  tenderly  the  petals  close 
around  them  in  the  cool,  and  open  through  fit 
hours  of  sunlight.  And  when  the  stamens  and 
the  pistil  cannot  meet  directly,  but  the  message 
must  be  borne  by  insect  rovers,  then  the  compli- 
cation of  contrivance  to  secure  the  transport  of 
the  message  almost  exceeds  belief.  The  pollen 
must  be  brought  from  a  certain  spot  in  one 
flower  and  left  on  a  certain  spot  within  an- 
other. Says  one,  speaking  of  Darwin's  investi- 
gation of  the  orchids  :  "  '  Moth-traps  and  spring- 
guns  set  on  these  grounds'  might  well  be  the 
motto  of    these   flowers.      There    are    channels 


FLOWERS.  73 

of  approach  along  which  the  nectar-loving  in- 
sects are  surely  guided,  so  as  to  compel  them  to 
pass  the  given  spots  ;  there  are  adhesive  plasters 
nicely  adjusted  to  fit  their  j^robosces  or  to  catch 
their  brows,  and  so  unload  their  pollen-burden ; 
sometimes,  where  they  enter  for  the  honey, 
there  are  hair-triggers  carefully  set  in  their 
necessary  jjath,  communicating  with  explosive 
shells  that  project  the  pollen-stalks  with  unerr- 
ing aim  upon  their  bodies."  And  now  Darwin 
adds  to  his  explanations  the  thought  (it  is  not 
yet  wholly  proved,  but  it  is  well  advanced  in 
proof)  that  the  lustrous  colors  of  the  flowers  and 
their  rich  odors  are  also  contrivances  to  aid  in 
the  reproduction.  He  has  found  it  "  an  invari- 
able rule  that  flowers  fertilized  by  the  wind 
never  have  the  gayly-colored  petals,"  and  draws 
the  inference  that  the  beauty  and  the  fragrance 
come  upon  the  blossoms  by  long  processes  of 
natural  selection,  because  attractive  to  the  in- 
sects that  are  needed  to  assist  in  fertilizing  them. 
The  colors  and  the  songs  of  birds  and  insects, 
lie  thinks,  are  in  jDart  similarly  brought  about. 
And  thus  all  that  gives  the  life  and  motion  and 
peculiar  gladness  to  the  fields  in  summer  would 
be   literally  but    the    deep   inbreathing    of   the 


74  A   YEAR   OF   MIRACLE. 

spirit  of  Love  in  !N'ature.  How  far  down  it 
goes,  to  touch  the  whole  planet  to  grace  and 
beauty!  The  thought  lifts  the  rims  of  our 
vision  and  gives  to  Love  a  glory  of  meaning 
that  we  never  guessed  before.  It  seems  to  make 
real  our  feeling  that  a  Father's  heart  is  beating 
in  all  things. 

And  in  this  distinction  of  sex  the  plants  lay 
hold  of  us.  They  come  between  the  mineral 
and  animal  kingdoms  as  the  connecting  link. 
For  plants  not  only  exercise  the  primitive  diges- 
tion,—  feeding  on  minerals,  which  they  organize 
into  the  food  on  which  we  higher  creatures  live ; 
they  not  only  hint,  while  they  prepare,  our  re- 
spiration,—  draining  clear  the  air  of  that  which 
poisons  us,  and  restocking  it  with  that  which 
we  must  breathe ;  but,  in  this  distinction  of  sex 
in  their  flowers,  they  rise  to  the  height  of  their 
stature  and  foreshadow  the  third  great  function 
of  animal  life,  that  of  reproduction.  Of  the 
whole  plant,  the  flower  is  the  part  nearest  akin 
to  us.  Like  us,  it  breathes  oxygen  and  gives 
out  carbonic  acid.  Like  us,  it  therefore  gives 
out  heat, —  the  flower  is  the  hottest  part  of 
the  plant.  Like  us,  it  has  rest  —  seasons, — 
sleep,  so  called ;  and  for  reproduction  needs  to 


FLOWERS.  /  5 

hoard,  and,  in  tlie  process,  exhausts  vitality. 
And,  like  animals,  plants  have  ancestry  and 
cousinship,  and  can  only  be  arranged  in  a  true 
system  when  we  arrange  them  physiologically. 
"  Consider  the  lilies,"  said  Jesus.  When  we 
"  consider "  them  and  find  such  thoughts  as 
these  awaiting  us,  the  words  of  another  poet 
seem  to  rhyme  across  the  centuries  to  his :  — 

"  Flower  in  the  crannied  wall, 
I  pluck  you  out  of  the  crannies, — 
Hold  you  here,  root  and  all,  in  my  hand, 
Little  flower;  but  if  I  could  understand 
What  you  are,  root  and  all,  and  all  in  all, 
I  should  know  what  God  and  man  is  !  " 

But  I  must  leave  the  flowers  themselves  to 
speak  a  word  about  man's  love  of  flowers.  The 
love  declares  itself  in  many  ways. 

The  Arabs,  i3assing  a  rich  harvest-field  or  a 
tree  in  full  bloom,  will  greet  it  with  a  "  Barak 
Allah!"  "May  God  bless  you!"  That  hints 
the  world-wide  feeling.  And  the  Arab  beggars 
name  their  children  Ruby,  Diamond,  Lily,  Rose, 
and  Jessamine.  So  still  do  we.  Gems  and 
flowers, —  each  the  highest  product  of  its  king- 
dom, for  a  gem  is  the  exquisiteness  of  flint  or 
clay,  and  flower  the  transfiguration  of  the  plant, 


76  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

—  instinctively  we  t.ake  them  to  name  all  other 
things  precious  and  beautiful. 

We  place  the  pots,  like  traps  to  catch  the 
sunbeams,  at  our  windows,  and  like  to  set  crea- 
tion going  in  our  parlors.  We  make  believe  at 
"woods"  in  little  ferneries.  We  concentrate 
the  fields  in  our  gardens,  and  the  climates  in 
our  green-houses.  In  southern  France  there  are 
flower-farms.  The  Flower  Mission  to  the  hos- 
pitals and  prisons  is  the  daintiest  form  of  mod- 
ern loving-kindness.  The  Horticultural  Society 
in  Boston  holds  a  Saturday  morning  worship 
all  through  tlie  summer,  and  it  is  better  than 
cathedral-joy  to  linger  at  its  altars.  In  Eng- 
land, the  rich  people  have  established  Flower 
Exhibitions  for  workingmen.  Tlie  little  gardens 
that  furnish  the  display  are  Avindow-ledges  in 
the  back  streets  of  London,  or  a  box  upon  the 
roof-top,  or  little  plots,  six  feet  by  ten,  before 
the  door.  A  boy  will  bring  his  solitary  gera- 
nium, a  girl  her  carnation,  the  father  has  his 
one  or  two  rare  roses  (})crhaps  the  money  that 
bought  them  was  saved  from  tlie  ale-house), 
whose  every  leaf-bud  h  is  made  breakfast-talk 
and  after-supper  w  itcliings  for  the  family. 
Each   comi^eting  pot   must   have   its  seal   and 


FLOWERS.  77 

knot  of  ribbon.  And,  when  the  day  arrives, 
the  lords  and  kidies  come  and  look  and  praise, 
and  then  tlie  sixpenny  admission  lets  in  the 
eager,  well-dressed  crowd, —  and  all  get  prizes, 
I  believe ;  and  the  factory-hands  go  home  dc- 
cldhig  Avhat  flower  they  will  train  to  enter  at 
the  next  annual  show.  The  factory-hand's  life 
holds  room  for  that ! 

Love  has  made  many  lovers  foolish ;  but  it 
took  flower-love  to  drive  a  nation  crazy.  And 
of  all  nations  it  was  the  sober-headed  Dutch- 
men !  Once  in  Holland  they  grew  ecstatic  over 
tulips ;  so  crazily  fond  of  tulips  that  two  thou- 
sand dollars  was  cheap  for  a  certain  bulb.  All 
ranks,  high  and  low,  were  carried  off  their  un- 
derstandings into  tulip-speculations ;  the  towns 
had  their  tulip-exchange  ;  the  public  notary  be- 
came the  tulip-notary.  And  when  the  bubble 
burst,  fortunes  vanished,  the  panic  was  national, 
and  the  country  did  not  get  over  the  shock  to 
its  commerce  for  several  years. 

In  other  ways  tlian  this  of  cultivation,  the 
ancient  love  has  shown  itself.  Art  has  fed  itself 
on  flowers.  Architecture  tells  the  story  earliest. 
The  heavy  Egyj)lian  column  imitates,  it  is  sup- 
posed, the  palm-tree's  trunk,  and  its  cai^ital  the 


78  A   YEAR   OF    MIRACLE. 

lotus-bud  of  the  Nile.  The  Corinthian  capital 
is  the  acanthus-leaf.  The  stones  of  Gothic  ar- 
chitecture conspire  in  a  hundred  forms  to  imi- 
tate the  vegetable  structure. 

Poetry  is  full  of  flower-fields,  because  each 
flower  seems  full  of  poetry  to  us.  The  flower- 
names  are  often  little  jooems  in  themselves.  Those 
long,  uncouth  names,  dreaded  in  botany,  hide 
Nature-meanings  in  them.  Heliotrope  is  "she 
who  turns  to  tlie  sun";  mesembryanthemum  is 
"  flower  of  the  mid-day  "  ;  nasturtium  carries  its 
meaning  of  "bent-nose"  in  its  face;  geranium 
is  "crane's-bill,"  —  let  the  seed-vessel  grow  and 
it  will  tell  tlie  reason  why ;  saxifrage  is  "  rock- 
cleaver,"  named  so  from  its  birthi^lace  in  the 
clefts ;  anemone  is  "  wind-flower."  These,  you 
see,  were  but  simple  heart  and  eye  names  to 
the  Greeks  or  Romans,  just  as  we  call  the  pets 
heart's-ease,  day's -eye,  morning-glory,  honey- 
suckle, mignonette.  Each  people  has  its  own. 
Other  flower-names  come  down  to  us  impearled 
with  myth  and  story, —  the  hyacinth,  narcissus, 
Solomon's -seal,  arethusa,  the  passion-flower. 
What  sacred  romances  the  lotus-flower,  the  mar- 
tyr's palm,  tlie  victor's  laurel,  recall!  There 
is  probably  no  famous  poet  that  has  not  sealed 


FLOWERS.  70 

his  fame  into  a  song  about  some  favorite  of  the 
fields.  Wordsworth's  celandines  and  daffodils 
are  noted,  and  Burns's  daisy,  and  Herbert's  rose, 
and  Emerson's  rhodora,  and  Lowell's  dandelion ; 
while  in  Chaucer  the  whole  spring  buds  and 
sings,  and  all  along  the  lines  of  Tennyson  flow- 
ers brush  you  with  fine  touches. 

Nay,  every  one  plays  poet  with  them,  al- 
though he  write  no  verses.  We  use  them  to 
interpret  all  the  tenderest  things  in  life.  When 
the  lovers  want  to  tell  the  unutterable  words, 
they  betake  themselves  to  the  dumb  messengers 
who  have  learned  to  say  so  much.  When  we 
want  to  remember  a  hill-top  view,  a  meeting 
that  has  made  a  holiday,  some  spot  holy  with 
old  history,  we  pluck  a  flower  to  hold  the  mem- 
ory fast.  When  we  want  to  send  the  home- 
presence  tangibly  in  a  letter,  a  flower  from  the 
window  or  the  field  close  by  will  carry  it  best. 
Old  books  drop  out  the  faded  blossoms,  put 
there  "  to  mark  great  places  with  due  grati- 
tude." The  California  miner  caught  sight  of 
the  mountain  heart's-ease  just  where  his  up- 
lifted pick  was  going  to  fall,  and,  ere  it  fell, 
he  was  at  home  across  the  continent,  and  in 
his    own    pasture  where,   a    barefoot    boy,  he 


80  A   YEAR   OF    MIRACLE. 

drove  the  cows  a  thousand  times.  Hollyhocks 
and  lilacs, —  who  thinks  of  them,  and  does  not 
see  a  quiet  country  dooryard  in  the  sunshine? 
The  sick  soldiers  in  army  hospitals,  longing  for 
certain  faces,  tones  and  touches,  greeted  the 
flowers  as  the  best  substitute.  "Now,  I've  got 
something  for  you ! "  said  a  woman-nurse,  hold- 
ing the  bunch  behind  her,  to  a  very  sick  New 
England  soldier,  "something  for  you,  just  like 
what  grows  in  your  front  dooryard  at  home. 
Guess  !  "  "  Lalocs  !  "  he  whispered  ;  and  she 
laid  them  on  his  folded  hands.  "  O  lalocs ! 
how  did  you  know  that?"  The  lilacs  outlived 
him. 

Flowers  and  Art;  flowers  and  Poetry;  we 
must  add,  —  the  flowers  and  Science.  For  in 
the  flowers  a  name  is  written,  and  to-day  that 
name  is  found  to  have  been  written  from  the  be- 
gmning  in  all  things  that  are.  All  things  groio. 
The  flower  is  type  of  the  universe,  and  the  lily 
of  the  field  is  solving  afresh  for  us  the  problems 
of  creation :  — 

We  linger  at  the  vigil 

With  him  who  bent  the  knee 
To  watch  the  old-time  lilies 

lu  distant  Galilee ; 


FLOWERS.  81 

And  still  the  worship  deepens 

And  quickens  into  new, 
As,  brightening  down  the  ages, 

God's  secret  thrilleth  through  : 
The  flower-horizons  open  ! 

The  blossom  vaster  shows  ! 
We  liear  the  wide  worlds  echo, — 

"  See  how  the  lily  grows  ! " 

Nature  shows  us  the  world-systems  "grow- 
ing,"—  growing  from  the  nebula  through  aeons 
of  gaseous  and  fluid  toward  the  solid  state ; 
shows  our  earth  "  growing  "  from  its  naked 
chaos  up  to  the  beauty  of  man's  present  dwell- 
ing-place ;  shows  life  on  the  earth  "  growing " 
through  uncouth  forms  and  dim  sensations  up 
to  the  beauty  of  man's  stature  and  the  miracle 
of  human  brain.  Not  "  creation "  anywhere, 
but  evolution ;  not  manufacture,  but  growth ; 
not  inbreaking  miracles,  but  steadfast,  forces 
of  transfiguration  moving  all  things  on  by  law 
not  a  God  decreeing  from  without,  but  the  Liv- 
ing Power  within  each  and  all  things,  "working 
hitherto." 

History  shows  us  thought  and  morals  "  grow- 
ing" from  beast-likeness  up  to  all  we  hail  as 
most  divine,  most  "  personal."  No  "  pause  in 
history"  at  such  eras  as  the  origin  of   Chris- 


82  A   YEAR   OF    MIRACLE. 

itiiiiity, —  no  halt  and  then  an  "  origin,"  at  all, — - 
no  sudden  grace  of  "revelation"  injected  then 
into  human  borders ;  but  Man  upon  those 
Mediterranean  shores  slowly  ripening  amid  the 
change  of  empires  and  religions,  until  the  recog- 
nition of  God's  fatherhood  and  men's  brother- 
hood and  the  god-likeness  of  self-sacrifice  for 
others,  came  as  natural  blossoms  on  the  stem 
of  time. 

And  consciousness  reveals  the  flower-law  in 
the  processes  of  personal  salvation.  The  sin- 
ner "  grows "  toward  the  saint,  as  he  tries  and 
fails  and  tries  again  from  day  to  day;  heaven 
is  a  gradual  winning,  not  a  surprise  of  giving; 
the  kingdom  of  heaven  comes  not  to  the  earth, 
but  comes  on  the  earth  by  "growing"  there; 
and  the  prayer  "  Thy  will  be  done !  "  can  blos- 
som to  an  answer  only  as  each  one  "  grows  "  to 
do  the  will :  — 

Shy  yearnings  of  the  savage, 

Unfolding,  thought  by  thought, 
To  holy  lives  are  lifted, 

To  visions  fair  are  wrought ; 
The  races  rise  and  cluster. 

And  evils  fade  and  fall, 
Till  chaos  blooms  to  beauty, 

God's  purpose  crowning  all ! 


FLOWERS.  83 

And  so  the  flower-love,  mounting  through  art, 
poetry,  science,  sliows    itself   in  man's  icorship 
also.     Thought  seldom  rises  more  naturally  up 
to  God  than  Avhen  it  rises  from    bending  over 
flow^ers.     In   Buddhist    lands,    they    long    have 
been  the   choicest   offering  that  man  brin<Ts  to 
the   altar.     As   we   keep  the   Christ's  birthday 
with   evergreens,  the  east   keeps  the  Buddha's 
with  blossoms  ;  and  when  his  tomb  was  opened 
two  hundred  years  after  his  burial,  the  funeral 
flowers   were   found   more   fragrant    and   more 
exquisite  than    ever,  we    are   told.     There    are 
holy   blossoms    there    that    symbolize    the    sun, 
the  world,  the  throne  of  God,— flower-symbols 
as  sacred  to  millions   as  is  the  cross  to  Chris- 
tians.     We  bring  the  flowers  into  our  churches: 
like  music  visible,  they  fill  the  pauses  in  the  ser- 
vice ;  and  who  comes  here  witli  purer  face  or 
life  of  sweeter  obedience  to  the  laws  of  Nature  ? 
So   sw^eet,  so   pure,  they   are,  that,    like    our 
holiest   friends,  they   fit   not   joy  and  wedding 
moments    only,   but   still   more    naturally   they 
come   in    amid   the   tragedies,  the  silences,  the 
heart-breaks.     Is  not  this  the  reason  why? 

"  When  heaven  grows  dim,  and  faith  seeks  to  renew 
The  image  of  its  everlasting  dower, 
I  know  no  argument  so  sweet  as  through 
The  bosom  of  a  flower, — 


84  A    YEAR    OK    MIRACLE. 

"A  wicket-gate  to  heaven  (of  which  Death 
Is  the  grand  portal,  sealed  to  mortal  eyes), 
Between  whose  little  bars  there  comes  the  breath 
Of  airs  from  Paradise." 

When  the  "  grand  portal "  has  opened  and 
shut  close  to  ns,  and  we  are  left  with  straining 
gaze  outside,  the  "wicket-gate"  seems  to  give 
comfort.  It  seems  to  grant  some  little  vision 
into  the  hidden  heart  of  things,  suggesting  that 
the  darkness  everywhere  holds  possibilities  bet- 
ter even  than  our  hopes.  Save  for  the  flower- 
fact,  who  could  have  dreamed  that  such  beauty- 
lurked  in  the  dark  earth,  was  latent  in  the  tiny 
seed?  So  we  place  the  flowers  around  the  still, 
cold  face;  we  lay  them  on  our  soldiers'  graves; 
we  bring  tliem  to  the  sick-room  and  the  bedside 
of  tlie  dying;  and  everywhere,  after  words  fail 
and  even  music  hushes,  their  presence  is  a  voice- 
less, unconfuted  argument  that  the  Power  within 
all  silences  and  ]')ains  and  tragedies  is  Love,  and 
that  the  possibilities  of  life  are  infinite. 


THE  HARVEST-SECRET. 


IV. 

THE  HARVEST-SECRET. 

What  is  a  Harvest-Season  ? 

It  is  Death  —  but  a  Fruition.  It  is  stripped 
trees,  but  barrelled  apples  ;  stubble  m  the  field, 
but  wheat  at  the  mill;  out-of-doors,  a  naked 
world,  the  summer-things  all  gone,  empty  nests, 
clinging  to  the  boughs,  brown  leaves  swinging 
their  Inst  hour  in  the  wind  or  rustling  crisply 
under  foot;  and,  indoors,  thanksgiving  season 
for  the  populations  saved  again,  and  for  glad 
homes  nestling  closer. 

The  dying  of  our  leaves  was  predetermined 
long  ago,  as  all  deaths  are,  in  the  very  constitu- 
tion of  their  frames.  The  earthy  minerals  that 
mingle  in  the  sap  and  climb  the  tree,  unable 
to  evaporate,  have  to  halt  up  in  the  tree-top ; 
and  there  they  pack  the  leaf-cells,  until  these 
lose  their  power  to  vitalize  the  sap.  But,  by  the 
time  this  happens,  it  is  October  and  the  fruit  is 
made ;  and  the  leaves,  their  first  use  over,  are 


88  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

nearly  ready  for  a  second, —  to  play  the  part  of 
little  carriers,  and  bear  their  pack  of  minerals 
back  into  the  ground.  Almost  as  soon  as  they 
appeared  in  spring,  this  moment  was  foreseen 
and  preparation  made  for  it.  Where  the  leaf- 
stalk joins  the  twig,  a  ring  of  thick  cells  began 
to  grow  across  from  outside  inwards  and  bar 
the  entrance  of  the  sap, —  sealing  beforehand 
what  would  else  have  been  a  wound  upon  the 
twig,  and  at  last  leaving  the  leaf  so  loosely  held 
that  the  pat  of  any  wandering  breeze  will  push 
it  off.  Presently,  but  not  until  the  fruition- 
deed  is  done,  the  fateful  breeze  arrives  ;  and  the 
leaves,  faithful  unto  death  to  the  Lord  of  the 
Harvest,  go  where  good  leaves  go, — • 

"  Where  the  rain  may  rain  upon  them, 
Where  the  sun  may  shine  upon  them, 
Where  the  wind  may  sigh  upon  them, 
And  the  snow  may  die  upon  them,"  — 

there,  even  in  death,  to  minister  to  the  beauty  of 
new  leaves  that  are  to  be.  And  as  they  cease 
from  their  higher  use.  Beauty,  the  reward  of 
Use  comes  over  them  :  their  colors  turn  the  hill- 
sides around  New  England  villages  into  walls 
like  the  New  Jerusalem's, —  that  city  of  clear 
gold,  whose  wall  was  garnished  with  all  precious 
stones. 


THE    HARVEST-SECRET.  89 

Fruition  and  a  Death.  That  does  not  mean 
success  becoming  faikire,  then.  The  dying  is 
part  of  the  success.  The  loyal  leaves!  they 
would  resent  a  funeral  sermon  preached  or 
dirges  sung  above  them.  Their  very  last  word, 
their  death-murmur,  is  "Z?*/b.^"  "We  have 
not  been  destroyed,"  they  say :  "  we  have  been 
fulfilled  in  fruit  that  we  have  made :  in  it  we 
have  eternal  life." 

They  tell  the  truth.  It  is  their  fruit.  It  is 
the  leaves  that  have  made  the  fruit ;  and  fruit, 
the  culmination  of  the  plant,  is  the  germ  of 
their  continued  life. 

For  "  fruit "  is  but  ripened  seed^  or  the  seed- 
vessels  with  the  parts  immediately  connected. 
We  call  it  wheat  or  barley  or  chestnut,  if  the 
sheath  be  hard;  grapes,  blueberries,  orange, 
melon,  if  the  sheath  be  soft  and  fleshy.  If  the 
outside  of  the  sheath  be  soft  while  the  inner 
side  is  stony,  then  it  is  the  cherry  or  the  peach. 
If  the  coat  is  a  stringy  membrane,  we  have 
bean-pods.  If  the  calyx,  instead  of  dropping 
off,  hugs  the  seed-case,  and  swells  out  to  thick, 
sweet  flesh  around  it,  then  we  say  that  our 
apples  and  pears  and  quinces  are  getting  ripe. 
Or,  if  a  number  of  the  seeds  cluster  close   to- 


90  A   YEAR   OF   MIRACLE. 

gether  around  a  pulpy  base,  they  make  our  straw- 
berries and  blackberries.  But  always,  whatever 
form  or  name  it  takes,  fruit  is  ripened  seed; 
and  the  whole  summer's  labor  of  the  leaves  has 
been  to  make  that  seed. 

How  have  they  done  it?  It  is  the  secret 
called  "  Organization."  We  touched  on  it  be- 
fore in  speaking  of  the  Kesurrections. 

If  our  apples  had  a  tongue  between  their 
red  cheeks,  they  would  tell  us  that  once  they 
were  a  part  of  the  atmosphere  and  the  ocean  ; 
that  they  were  made  of  salt  sea-vapors  and  the 
long  spring-rains  and  the  melting  snow-crystals, 
—  of  these,  with  the  carbonic  acid  and  ammo- 
nia, which  the  rain  in  falling  through  the  air  dis- 
solved, and  a  trifle  of  the  soluble  minerals  lurk- 
ing in  the  earth  where  the  orchard's  rootlets 
crept.  That  they  ivere, —  and  now  they  are  our 
Baldwins  in  the  cellar,  red-cheeked  indeed,  but 
not  because  they  blush  to  own  that  lowly  origin. 
In  the  process  of  transmutation  from  what  they 
were  to  what  they  are,  it  is  the  leaves  that  have 
been  the  chief  agent.  They  have  acted  like  air- 
fed  mouths  for  the  tree ;  like  skin,  to  evaporate 
Its  water;  perhaps  as  heart,  to  help  pump  up 


THE    HARVEST-SECRET.  91 

the  sap  from  down  below  ;  but  their  grand  func- 
tion has  been  to  act  as  the  tree's  stomach  and 
assimilate  its  food.  When  the  sap  from  Mother 
Earth  reaches  the  tree-top,  although  slightly 
changed  on  the  way  up  through  the  tree-ducts, 
it  is  still  little  else  than  crude  sap,  still  in  es- 
sence mineral ;  it  is  not  vital ;  it  can  make  no 
plant-cells  yet.  But  let  this  liquid  mineral  only 
reach  the  leaf  and  have  the  sunlight  fall  upon 
it  there,  and  the  wonder  happens, —  Nature's 
perpetual  miracle  of  Cana,  by  which  the  crude 
rain-water  is  "  organized  "  into  a  subtiler  fluid ! 
Somehow,  the  light-waves  do  it.  The  story 
that  the  men  of  science  tell  of  it,  their  most 
cunning  guess  (it  is  but  guess),  sounds  like  a 
tale  of  the  Arabian  Nights.  Here  it  is,  made 
brief :  — 

The  ocean-waves,  breaking  against  the  shores 
of  continents,  gradually  waste  those  shores  away 
and  spread  them  out  into  sea-beds,  that  by  and 
by  emerge  and  make  the  plains  of  continents  to 
be.  What  the  ocean-waves,  on  the  grand  scale, 
take  the  centuries  to  do,  the  unseen  heat  and 
light-ioaves  flashing  through  the  ether,— forty, 
fifty,  sixty  thousand  of  them  playing  in  -an  inch ! 
—  five,  six,  seven  hundred  billions  of  them  ar- 


92  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

riving  in  a  second  ! — •  these  heat  and  light  waves 
are  supposed  to  do  at  every  instant  to  the  mole- 
cules of  the  substances  on  which  they  strike. 
The  mimic  tides  pull  down  the  structure  of  the 
molecules,  mingle  their  atoms  together,  and 
build  them  over  on  a  different  plan.  The  un- 
pilings  and  rej^ilings  go  on  in  j^erfect  harmony, 
each  element  seeking  its  new  mates  by  fixed 
laws  of  attraction,  and  mingling  with  them  only 
in  definite  proportions, —  as  if  the  old  Greek 
myth  were  fact,  and  some  unseen  Orj^heus  sat 
by  in  Nature  like  him  wlio  charmed  the  rocks  by 
music  into  walls.  And  the  more  intricate  the 
"pile,"  the  more  complex  the  molecule's  plan, 
so  much  the  more  "  vital  "  grows  the  substance. 
This,  then,  is  what  haj^pens  in  the  leaf.  At  the 
touch  of  the  sun-tides,  the  earthy  sap  within  it 
decomj^oses  and  rearranges  its  constituent  atoms 
of  oxygen  and  hydrogen,  of  nitrogen  and  carbon 
and  the  rest, —  rearranges  all  in  forms  more  in- 
tricate. Thereby,  the  mineral  turns  to  j^lant, 
the  "  inorganic  "  to  "  organic,"  the  unborn  be- 
comes alive  !  And  the  holy  ground  where  this 
drama  of  perpetual  Creation  goes  on  through 
all  the  -springs  and  summers  everywhere  is  — 
the  Green  Leaf.      So  far  as   the   plant  is  con- 


THE    HARVEST-SECRET.  93 

cerned,  to  that  belongs  the  credit  of  the  great 
transfiguration. 

The   sap,   thus   vitalized,   then    descends    the 
tree.     According  to  the  chemistry  of   separate 
locations,  it  becomes  a  hundred  different  things. 
Where  only  three  of  its  four  chief  elements  co- 
operate, it  builds  the  cell  and  fibre-walls,— our 
timber;    and  makes  the  sugar  and   starch    and 
gums  and  oils  to  which  we  owe  that  part  of  our 
food  which  supports  breath  and  keeps  the  body 
warm.     But  where  the  fourth  element,  the  nitro- 
gen, is  added  in,  the  sap  becomes   a  live  sub- 
stance, "protoplasm,"  that  bathes  and  lines  the 
cells  and  coats  their  nucleus,  that  enters  into  the 
green  of  leaf  and  bark,  that  gathers  still  more 
richly  in  the  blossom,  and  that  most  of  all  con- 
centrates in  the  seed,  stocking  it  with  that  other 
part   of   food,  which   builds   up    our   flesh    and 
frame.     Most  of  all  concentrates  in  the  seed,  I 
say :  seed  is  the  most  vital  substance,  the  very 
highest  being  in  all  the  structure  of  the  plant. 
Its  atoms  are  the  outcome  of  the   tree's  whole 
past,  the  germ  of   all  its  future.     It  is  all   the 
old  and  all  the  new,  in  one.     For  this  the  root- 
lets sucked,  the  sap  ran,  the  twigs  budded,  the 
leaves  uncurled  and  veined  and  spread  and  filled 


94  A  YEAR   OF   MIRACLE. 

the  tree,  and  breathed  the  sunshine  in,  and 
stood  up  to  greet  the  showers,  and  held  on 
through  the  tug  of  storms ;  and  for  this  tlie 
flowers, — which,  as  we  have  seen,  are  but  the 
"first  families"  of  leafdom, —  for  tliis  the  flow- 
ers arrayed  themselves  and  celebrated  the  little 
weddings,  and  then  chambered  their  very  hearts, 
—  all  for  this  end,  that,  at  last,  the  seed-children 
might  grow  and  cluster  there.  All  was  for 
them,  and  they  are  the  "fruit."  In  every  tree 
and  violet  and  grass,  in  every  lichen  on  its  rock, 
in  every  cloudlike  pulj)  that  stains  the  ditches 
green,  in  every  weed  that  swings  at  anchor  in 
the  seas,  this  seed-making  (or  some  process  kin 
to  it)  has  been  carried  on  through  all  the  days 
and  nights  since  earliest  spring.  No  man 
through  all  the  populations  could  make  one. 
Earth  and  Sun,  it  takes  them  both, —  it  takes  a 
solar  system^  all  alive^  to  make  a  seed ! 

It  is  October,  and  again  the  deed  is  done ! 
The  ripened  seed-vessels  hold  the  hope  of  the 
world.  New  root,  new  stem,  new  leaf,  new 
bud,  and  all  the  possibilities  that  sleep  in  them, 
are  there  wrapped  up  together.  In  these,  the 
next  spring's  resurrection,  next  summer's  glory, 
next  autumn's  gold  and  red,  lie  already  in  em- 


THE    HARVEST-SECRET.  95 

bryo.  And  everything  is  safe.  Fear  not,  O 
lands !  Be  not  afraid,  O  fields  !  Let  the  leaves 
die,  and  the  cold  come  out  of  the  north  ! 

What  sanctity,  what  wonder  past  wonder, 
hallows  the  tiny  thing  so  wrought  and  put  to- 
gether !  As  Ave  hold  a  grain  of  corn  or  wheat 
in  our  hand,  and  look  at  it,  and  think  how  it 
sums  up  the  year, — 

"  Then,  suddenly,  the  awe  grows  deep. 
Until  a  folding  sense,  like  praj^er. 
Which  is,  as  God  is,  everywhere, 
Gathers  about  us ;  and  a  voice 
Speaks  to  us  without  any  noise. 
Being  of  the  silence," 

and,  lo!  we  are  at  worship, —  listening  bowed 
before  a  seed ! 

And  should  we  trace  yet  farther  that  little 
handful  of  the  year's  great  harvest  which  we 
shut  up  in  barns  and  loaves  and  call  "our" 
harvest, —  and  which  is  as  incidental  to  the  trees 
and  grasses  as  the  birds'  nests  are  that  hide  in 
them, — it  would  be  simply  tracing  higher  this 
same  process  of  "  organization.'^'' 

On  Thanksgiving  Day,  as  we  draw  our  chairs 
around  the  table,  if  Ave  stop  a  moment  and 
think  over  the  familiar  story  so  wonderful  and 


96  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

praiseful, —  think  what  miracles  have  been  en- 
acted to  -spread  the  table  for  us,  how  last  spring 
the  dinner  lay  in  minerals  and  was  blowing  in 
the  air,  and  how  rains  and  storms  and  rise  and 
set  of  suns  and  summer-noons  and  starry  nights 
have  wrought,  till,  lo  !  the  squash  for  our  Thanks- 
giving pies,  the  cranberries  for  our  sauce, —  that 
will  seem  miracle  enough !  But  our  turkey,  if 
we  have  one,  is  a  greater  marvel  yet.  You  know 
what  the  western  farmer  does,  when  it  costs  too 
much  to  transport  his  corn  in  bulk  ?  He  feeds 
it  to  his  swine,  and  then  the  crops  come  on  four 
legs  across  the  prairies.  He  is  but  imitating  the 
Lord  of  the  Harvest.  We  cannot  go  to  the  grass 
and  eat  it  —  a  herd  of  Nebuchadnezzars.  But 
the  grass  comes  to  us !  God  —  to  give  that 
Power  by  which  we  live  a  name  —  God  gathers 
u])  the  sweetness  of  a  whole  hill-side  pasture, 
of  a  meadow  with  all  its  clovers,  of  a  sea  with  all 
its  swaying  weeds,  and,  in  the  quiet  grazers 
that  go  to  and  from  our  barn,  or  the  creatures 
that  cackle  out  their  little  lives  around  it,  or 
the  shy  rovers  of  the  woods  and  waters,  offers 
us  the  sweetness  economically  packed,  that  is, 
more  highly  organized^  built  up  now  into  flesh- 
atoms, —  atoms  more   complex,  more   vitalized, 


THE   HARVEST-SECRET.  97 

than  any  that  the  vegetable  world  contains.  It 
is-  but  the  process  of  plant-making  carried  a  step 
farther.  Another  transfiguration  has  occurred. 
To  become  grass  is  Heaven  to  minerals.  To  be- 
come ox  is  Heaven  to  the  grass.  To  become 
man  is  a  kind  of  unwelcome  Heaven  to  oxen! 

For,  after  dinner,  the  process  of  transfigura- 
tion will  continue.  The  atoms,  once  inside  of 
us,  will  rearrange  and  organize  themselves  in 
structures  more  and  more  wonderful,  till  in 
man's  brain,  the  most  complex  of  animal  struct- 
ures, we  literally  have,  as  one  has  said,  "  the  con- 
densation of  all  Space,  the  grand  evolved  result 
of  all  Time."  Listen  to  what  Dr.  Clarke  says 
of  our  human  brain  :  — 

"That  marvellous  and  delicate  engine,  which 
is  only  a  few  inches  in  diameter,  w^hose  weight 
on  an  average  is  only  about  forty-nine  ounces, 
contains  cells  and  fibres  counted  by  hundreds  of 
millions ;  cells  and  fibres  that  vary  in  thickness 
from  one  one-millionth  to  one  three-hundredth 
of  an  inch :  it  is  an  engine,  every  square  inch 
of  whose  gray  matter  affords  substrata  for  the 
evolution  of  at  least  eight  thousand  registered 
and  separate  ideas;  with  substrata  in  the  whole 
brain  for  evolving  and  registering  tens  of  mil- 


98  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

lions  of  them,  besides  the  power  of  recalling 
them  under  appropriate  stimulus  ;  an  engine 
that  transmits  sensation,  emotion,  thought,  and 
volition,  by  distinct  fibres,  whose  time-working 
has  been  measured  to  fractions  of  a  second;  it 
is  an  engine,  a  mechanism,  that  can  accomj^lish 
this,  and  greater  Avonders  still,  without  conscious 
friction,  pain,  or  disturbance,  if  it  be  only  prop- 
erly built  and  its  working  be  not  interfered 
with." 

From  air  and  rain  and  rock  to  human  brain, 
the  series  mounts !  And,  as  it  is  the  stored-up 
forces  of  the  skies  that  work  the  transformation^ 
Science  declares  us,  in  a  sense  more  real  than 
ever  the  grand  myth  fabled.  Children  of  the  Sun. 

This  is  "Organization,"  —  the  Secret  of  the 
Harvest. 

It  is  the  secret  of  all  God's  harvest-fields;  the 
way  in  which  he  hoards  the  gains  of  all  his  work 
from  waste.  It  is  the  miracle  within  the  mira- 
cle of  Snow  and  Kesurrection  and  the  Flowers. 

To  much  more  in  ourselves  than  the  structure 
of  the  body  it  is  a  clue.  Thanks  to  the  Harvest- 
Secret,  we  need  not  mourn  for  anything  as  lost, 
—  perhaps  need  mourn  for  nothing  as  even 
wholly  vanished. 


THE    HARVEST-SECRET.  99 

For  instance,  our  forgotten  knowledge.  "I 
have  forgotten  more  than  you  ever  knew,"  is  the 
poor  unction  some  of  us  have  to  quietly  lay  to 
our  souls  to  keep  up  self-respect,  Avhen  we  meet 
the  bright  young  people  all  equijjped  with  facts 
and  items.  But  how  is  knowledge  reckoned 
best, —  in  so  many  school-years,  so  niany  books 
read,  so  many  facts  hived  up  in  memory?  It  is 
good  to  have  facts  hived  away:  theories  are 
worth  nothing,  unless  based  on  them,  and,  as  a 
good  deal  of  a  man's  talk  is  theorizing,  it  is  help- 
ful to  have  at  hand  large  quarries  of  the  corner- 
stones. It  is  good  to  remember  the  books  we 
read,  and  the  faces  we  have  met,  and  what  names 
go  with  the  faces,  and  to  be  able  to  quote  the 
formulas  we  learned  when  young,  and  to  keep 
tlie  French  and  German  nimble  on  the  tongue. 
But  this  is  only  knowledge,  after  all,  not  wis- 
dom,—  which  is  knowledge  become  one''s  self;  it 
is  only  learning,  not  education, —  which  is  learn- 
ing transformed  to  faculti/.  It  is  only  the 
means  by  which,  and  not  the  end  for  which. 
It  is  only  leaves,  not  fruit. 

I  am  not  decrying  "culture";  but  the  college- 
gift  is  much  misvalued.  Many  a  man  gets  great 
good  from  college  who  at  his  graduation  could 


100  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

hardly  enter  over  again  for  lack  of  the  statistics 
and  dates  and  prosody  that  helped  to  pass  him 
in ;  and  to  whom,  in  a  few  years,  the  Greek  and 
trigonometry  become  more  Greek  and  unknown 
quantities  than  ever, —  great  good  he  gets,  be- 
cause, though  dropping  these,  he  has  meanwhile 
learned  by  their  aid  how  to  handle  his  mind. 
"He  knows  what  he  knows,  he  knows  that  he 
doesn't  know  much,  he  knows  how  to  get  what  he 
doesn't  know,  and  needs."  He  has  learned  that 
snap-judgments  are  worthless ;  that  nothing  is 
learned  until  both  sides  are  learned ;  and  he  has 
gained  a  certain  tactile  sense  by  which  shams 
in  culture  and  attainment  are  detected  at  quick 
sight.  And  this  is  no  bad  harvest  for  the  four 
years  spent  at  college.  But,  then,  just  because 
this  is  really  so  large  a  part  of  the  four  years' 
harvest,  many  a  man  who  never  goes  to  college 
gets  the  essence  of  the  college-education.  The 
very  best  result  of  culture  is  still  2i  finer  common- 
sense.  "Common-sense,"  —  the  knack  of  using 
swiftly,  surely,  and  in  conjunction,  the  common 
human  powers.  He  who  gets  that  knack  may 
boast  with  Richter  that  he  has  "  made  the  most 
he  could  out  of  the  stuff."  And  what  is  this 
common-sense  but  the  concentrated  result  of  a 


THE    HARVEST-SECRET.  101 

thousand  thousand  judgments,  memories,  reflec- 
tions, the  "organized"  j^roduct  and  final  out- 
come of  all  our  thinking  processes?  Such  or- 
ganized and  final  outcome,  as  we  have  seen,  is 
"fruit."  In  this  fruit,  a  finer  common-sense,  the 
books  and  lessons  and  days  and  persons  we  meet 
must  be  harvested,  or  they  are  as  good  as  lost, — 
"nothing  but  leaves."  If  so  harvested,  they 
have  been  saved,  although  in  themselves  the 
books,  days,  persons,  fade  from  memory  and  drop 
like  leaves  entirely  off  our  tree  of  life. 

I  said  that  those  who  count  as  the  unbred  not 
seldom  pass  by  the  highly  bred,  because  life's 
practical  school  has  proved  better  than  a  college 
to  train  these  common  powers.  The  scholar,  for 
instance,  ought  to  be  tlie^  one  best  furnished  to 
see  most  in  Europe, —  that  g-eat  mass  of  history 
crystallized  in  cities  and  cathedrals  and  old  art 
and  customs.  And  no  doubt  the  scholar  usually 
does  see  most.  But  have  you  never  found  your 
neighbor,  the  merchant,  who  began  life  as  a 
shop-boy,  and  ever  since  has  lived  among  his 
boxes  and  ledgers,  and  has  made  his  money, 
and  at  sixty  sets  out  with  his  wife  and  his  five 
children  t  >  go  the  rounds  of  Europe,  with  an 
English  Murray  in  every  pair  of  hands, —  have 


102  A   YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

you  never  found  him  coming  home  with  a  sur- 
prising amount  of  Europe  "  organized"  in  him? 
He  leans  back  in  his  chair  before  the  firephice 
and  tells  you  he  has  been  to  seventy-two  cities, 
and  has  a  picture  of  each  one  in  his  mind,  and 
he  knows  how  many  stairs  there  are  in  the 
cathedral-towers,  and  how  high  and  long  St. 
Peter's  is,  and  where  the  pictures  hang  in  the 
galleries  :  he  has  '^  done "  Europe.  But  none 
the  less  it  is  in  him  now, —  culture  and  joy  for 
the  rest  of  life.  And  how  has  he  been  able  to 
see  and  bring  home  so  much  ?  Because,  while 
working  over  those  boxes  and  ledgers  and  cor- 
respondence through  the  years  of  business-life, 
he  has  harvested  the  habit  of  wide-awakeness, 
the  quickness  to  see  minutely,  the  power  to 
seize  firmly  and  recall  vividly  details;  and  he 
carried  abroad  with  him  these  sheaves  of  fac- 
ulty all  barned  up  in  his  brain.  He  hardly 
knows  he  has  them ;  at  least,  he  had  never  sus- 
pected they  Avould  give  him  so  much  of  Europe. 
He  is  surprised  at  his  friends'  surprise  that  he 
has  seen  so  much:  "Who  couldn't?  It's  there 
to  see,"  he  says.  But,  none  the  less,  he  is  con- 
scious of  a  new  feeling  of  fellowship  with  those 
whom  he  had  always  before  revered  afar  off  as 


THE    HARVEST-SECRET.  103 

the  happy  possessors  of  that  mystic  "  culture." 
The  old  ledgers  are  mouldering  on  the  back 
shelf  in  the  cellar,  the  boxes  have  long  since 
turned  to  kindling-wood,  Avhile  the  shoes  or  can- 
dles or  drugs  they  held  have  gone  to  their  own 
place  :  all  have  dropped  out  of  the  merchant's 
life  like  leaves  from  tlie  tree,  but  they  have  left 
the  "  fruit "  of  ripened  faculty  behind  them,— 
"  seed  "  which  has  flowered  in  this  late  summer 
of  pleasant  knowledge  for  him. 

But  our  Harvest-Secret  is  as  true  of  other 
parts  of  life's  experience.  The  trials,  the  dis- 
appointments, the  sorrows  that  make  the  anni- 
versaries sad,  the  wane  of  friendships,  the  temp- 
tations that. were  hardly  put  under  foot,  are 
leaves  which  the  seasons  bring  and  the  seasons 
take  away.  To  no  purpose  ?  Nay,  they  give  us 
the  new  preciousness  of  ourselves,  our  strength 
of  spiritual  fibre,  our  wiser  philosophy  of  life, 
the  beautiful  lines  on  the  face,  the  quiet  cheer 
in  the  heart,  and  our  increasing  helpfulness. 

Do  you  know  no  woman  who  has  thus  been 
ripened  ?  Greet  her,—  she  has  had  small  chance 
outside  of  the  housekeeping,  but  you  find  her 
answering  you  with  bright,  live,  first-brain 
thoughts.      She  can   offer   you   her  experience 


104  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

against  your  schooling,  and  is  very  apt  to  give 
you  more  than  she  gets  from  you.  There  is  so 
much  of  her,  because  all  she  has  learned  by  life 
is  not  in  her  merely,  but  is  herself.  It  is  a  stay- 
at-home  wife,  or  a  plain-faced,  humble-minded 
sister ;  one  who  thinks  herself  a  mere  "  chink- 
filler."  Not  for  her  the  out-door  exhilaration, 
the  pleasant  changes  which  the  husband  or 
brother  has.  But  possibly  the  stamina  of  the 
home  lie  in  her,  and  not  in  him.  She  is,  per- 
haps, the  real  bulwark,  the  comfort,  the  pleasant 
crispness  of  the  household  life, —  and  he  the  limp- 
ness of  it,  although  he  earn  the  money.  Those 
tame  home-hours,  the  lonely  drudgeries,  that 
long  patience  with  the  children,  the  evenings 
over  their  stockings,  with  the  shut  book  waiting 
on  the  table  —  while  he  smokes  ;  the  mornings 
over  their  lessons  —  while  he  reads  the  paper; 
the  quiet  going  around  for  whims  —  his,  proba- 
ably ;  the  word  held  back  on  the  tongue;  —  all 
this  has  been  slowly  vested  in  strength  and  self- 
control  and  the  sweet  shrewdness.  She  is  con- 
tinually pulling  down  her  spirit-barns  and  build- 
ing bigger  to  hold  the  riches  of  her  harvest. 
She  is  gray-haired  before  she  finds  out  that 
the  harvest  is  a  large  one.  Many  generations  of 
stockings  have  passed  through  the  basket,  the 


THE    HARVEST-SECRET.  105 

boys  who  missed  the  spelling  so  are  grown  up, 
and  almost  all  those  little  doings  and  bearings 
are  forgotten :  those  leaves  have  dropped  from 
year  to  year,  but  the  seed  which  they  have 
made, —  her  friends  are  praising  that  when  they 
say,  "  How  good  she  is,  how  pleasant,  and  how 
we  lean  on  her ! "  The  citizens  are  praising 
that  when  they  elect  her  boys  to  the  legislature. 
My  merchant  and  his  wife  are  only  typical. 
It  is  you  and  I,  it  is  man  and  woman.  In  us  all, 
and  all  through  life,  the  Secret  of  the  Harvest 
is  the  same.  The  laws  of  the  seasons  reign  in 
us.  "  Herein  is  the  Father  glorified,  that  ice 
bear  much  fruit."  The  course  of  life  is  a  thou- 
sand trifles,  then  some  crisis, —  and  again  a 
thousand  trifles  and  a  crisis  :  nothing  but  green 
leaves  under  common  sun  and  shadow,  and  then 
a  storm  or  a  rare  June  day.  And  far  more 
than  the  storm  or  the  perfect  day  the  common 
sun  and  common  shadow  do  to  make  the  autumn 
rich.  It  is  the  "  every  days  "  that  count.  They 
must  be  made  to  tell,  or  the  years  have  failed. 
To  tell:  for  that,  thought  and  feeling  must  be- 
come action,  and  action  habit,  and  habit  turn  to 
principles  and  character.  And  if  for  some  of 
us,  and  sometimes  for  all  of  us,  action   cannot 


106  A    YEAR    OF    MIRACLE. 

mean   doing ^    then    remember   hearing^   too,   is 
action,  often  its  hardest  part. 

"  I  am  not  eager,  bold,  or  strong, — 
All  that  is  past ! 
I  am  ready  not  to  do. 
At  last, —  at  last ! " 

When  that  verse  comes  into  the  psalm  of  life, 
as,  sooner  or  later,  it  must  come,  let  us  remem- 
ber that  not-to-do  %oell  is  a  noble  well-doing. 
But  either  by  doing  or  by  bearing  we  must  act^ 
in  order  to  harvest  anything.  Action  is  to 
thought  and  feeling  what  the  leaf  is  to  the 
crude  sap :  then  of  action  habit  is  the  blossom, 
and  of  habit  character  is  the  fruit.  Character  is 
the  concentrated  result  of  life,  its  organized  de- 
posit, its  harvest  in  us,  and  the  seed  of  after-life. 
Between  the  bearings  and  the  doings,  our 
years  are  passing  fast.  Death  is  predetermined 
in  our  frames  as  in  that  of  the  leaves.  From 
ten  to  twenty,  we  hardly  know  it.  From  twenty 
to  thirty,  we  know,  but  little  care.  At  thirty, 
we  begin  to  care ;  for  already  June  is  Avell-nigh 
past !  Are  we  leafing  yet  ?  Are  we  only  leaf- 
ing:? Or  are  we  so  leafingj  that  life's  autumn 
shall  find  us  rich  in  j^leasant  fruit?  Are  we 
ripening  Seed? 


i 


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